I guess my point was that the fast languages are generally not the ones that are good for developing the fast algorithms. It is harder to experiment in a langua

I guess my point was that the fast languages are generally not the ones that are good for developing the fast algorithms. It is harder to experiment in a language like C than it is in a language like lisp or perl. The other thing to point out is that there is no reason for memory usage, concurrency or speed to be problems in dynamic languages. These are all issues with the implementations of compilers/interpreters that we are using. It just so happens that dynamic languages have only recently come back into vogue, and we have forgotten (at least in ruby and python) all of the work that was done to create efficient implementations of dynamic languages. Examples being how well Lisp stacked up against C as early as the 80-90s, projects like StrongTalk, stack based languages like forth... the multitude of papers on efficient scheme implementations. Dynamic languages were declared 'slow' and therefore were dumped in favor of C by most programmers. This has caused a gap in the knowledge that we have about implementing dynamic languages. Which is a shame, because there is a lot out there for us to relearn.