I was going to call this one "No blasters!  No blasters!" but it didn't make much sense, and two Star Wars titles in a row is too much for even a gigantic nerd like me to stomach.  Not that the current title is all that great...fuck it.

Anyway, whilst eating lunch with my pal B. Larsen* he mentioned the quintessential programming language shoot-out, which I had not seen in quite some time, and is worth taking a look at if you haven't seen it in a while.  It includes many hip new languages like Erlang and Ruby, and is quite detailed in how the languages are  benchmarked.

Among the most interesting pieces of information are the outliers.  Everyone knows C is fast.  But Haskell (a favorite of Larsen's) and Steel Bank Common Lisp (my langue de plume) both are much faster than I might have guessed.  And look at Ruby and PHP!  Ruby is 54 times slower than C!**  All this definitely makes  for some interesting discussion.  One cannot help but wonder why so many startups seem to favor such slow languages...




* His blog will likely never be updated again.  November!  Unbelievable.

** Yes, I know Ruby 2.0 will be much, much faster.  Even so, a great deal of web startups use Ruby NOW.  I question their judgment.