Re: Some thoughts about "slow languages"
All depends on the task in hand what language to use and how speed critical it is
I used to write perl scripts for doing heavily string processing intensive work on large datasets for the support team.
They wanted to know why, when most tools were written in C#, they had to use Perl for this...
So I wrote a C# app to do the equivalent and they then saw it was orders of magnitude slower (crucially slow enough that support would say this is no use for our needs) as C#t was just not a good language for the task whereas Perl was.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
