In regards to level of ease of writing, I'm assuming some level of competency in the languages we are talking about, all languages have a learning curve. In re

In regards to level of ease of writing, I'm assuming some level of competency in the languages we are talking about, all languages have a learning curve. In regards to speed as other comments have also pointed out some of the asserts were optimised out of some of the Ariane 5 code, while the ones left in worked towards the cause of the issue ;) The reason Java is in there is due to the libraries available, you can use those libraries with other JVM hosted languages like clojure ;) now tell me it's not maintainable. Similar reasons why python is in that list, I believe no OOP language is truly maintainable at this point, it adds to much complexity.