On 5/16/2012 3:57 PM, Bardur Arantsson wrote:
Comparing languages is a highly non-trivial matter involving various disciplines (including various squidgy ones) and rarely makes sense without a very specific context for comparison. So the short answer is: mu. Discovering the long answer requires a lifetime or more of research and may not actually result in an answer. Depends on your goal.
From the discussion on the cafe, it appears that many believe performance is not the only criteria for evaluating languages. I agree with the comment made by Ertugrul Söylemez. Some people focus on getting the best performance because they don't know any better. If given better evaluation criteria they might think differently. Asserting the other criteria publicly helps others understand the benefits of Haskell, otherwise they just see the lower performance numbers from places like the debian contest.