wreckimnaked

I disagree. Given that C exposes you to some hardware details that are abstracted when developing in some higher level language such as Ruby, for instance having to deal with overflow on signed/unsigned types and register variables (I know that compilers will mostly ignore that, but it's still a language feature).

The average Ruby programmer, on it's turn, can perfectly live without knowing C programming. A more accurate analogy would be to a Ruby programmer to know about the language implementation being using (MRI, JRuby, Rubinius, etc.)

Changes to the code just need to be evaluated again to override the previous function definitions. It ends up being a really fast workflow.

1: http://www.martiansoftware.com/nailgun/ 2: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2501 3: https://github.com/sattvik/lein-tarsier

For instance, you can install the precompiled chromium from the repos with yaourt -S chromium; if you need to recompile it from ABS, throw a yaourt -Sb chromium and you are done. To install the binary build from AUR, yaourt -S chromium-browser-bin will do it.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Yaourt

    5) It scalability is a joke. I've worked as a Java contractor at a number of places and what a PERL/PHP/Python solution can get done in 5 boxes, it takes Java 30-40 boxes. This is NOT an exagerration.

A good experience would be get 4 experienced developers to read and evaluate a piece of code; that'd raise some interesting practical aspects of their evaluation of its goodness.

My intention was to state that idiomatic code is not necessarily the most performant one, and that the codes used in the benchmarks game may contain some not very idiomatic optimization codes [2].

That said, it tends to evaluate the implementation of a certain compiler, and not exactly how the constructs and concepts of those languages result on the measured performance.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_bias 2: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=cha...

PS: Betteridge's law

That'd be a shame. X, Y, A and B sounds more Super Nintendo than Xbox.

needless to say that all benchmarks will be very biased, as idiomatic code is not necessarily the most optimized one.

Is not about how many people connect their PCs to their televisions, but about how they enjoy playing their games. IMHO that does not justify the Microsoft exclusivity strategy.