Mean would be a better choice if a typical real-world application were split approximately equally between each of these tasks. Which is of course patently untr

Mean would be a better choice if a typical real-world application were split approximately equally between each of these tasks. Which is of course patently untrue, particularly so because writing number-crunching code in Fortran does not prevent you from writing your hash-table code in something else (note how the best C binary-trees code is actually calling an external library). Comparison of medians is nice because it shows that for approximately half of fairly diverse tasks one language is faster than another, which imo is a much more interesting statistic.