Re:The eternal quest... (Score 4, Informative)

Another interesting comparison of programming languages is "An empirical comparison of C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl"
The interesting conclusions are:

• Designing and writing the program in Perl, Python, Rexx, or Tcl takes no more than half as much time as writing it in C, C++, or Java and the resulting program is only half as long.
  
• No unambiguous differences in program reliability between the language groups were observed.
  
• The typical memory consumption of a script program is about twice that of a C or C++ program. For Java it is another factor of two higher.
  
• For the initialization phase of the phonecode program (reading the 1 MB dictionary file and creating the 70k- entry internal data structure), the C and C++ programs have a strong run time advantage of about factor 3 to 4 compared to Java and about 5 to 10 compared to the script languages.
  
• For the main phase of the phonecode program (search through the internal data structure), the advantage in run time of C or C++ versus Java is only about factor 2 and the script programs even tend to be faster than the Java programs.
  
• Within the script languages, Python and in particular Perl are faster than Tcl for both phases.
  
• For all program aspects investigated, the performance variability due to different programmers (as described by the bad/good ratios) is on average about as large or even larger than the variability due to different languages.