"More often than not it is not the language that decides the performance of a system, but the ability of the programmer to come up with sensible designs." A lo

"More often than not it is not the language that decides the performance of a system, but the ability of the programmer to come up with sensible designs." A lot of people forget that. Most of the software I've encountered that displayed performance problems did so because of endemic architectural flaws and bad code. Pointless complexity usually leads to slow software. In most well-written applications, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a version on C++ or a version in Java, because the software is rarely the bottleneck. Obvious exceptions are applications like games and 3D animation systems, where there's a lot of computation going on all the time. A well-written word processor in Ruby might well feel MORE responsive than a poorly written one in C++, for example.