You might find this interesting: http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/prechelt/Biblio/jccpprtTR.pdf http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/prechelt/Biblio/jccpprtTR.pdf "For all p

You might find this interesting: http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/prechelt/Biblio/jccpprtTR.pdf http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/prechelt/Biblio/jccpprtTR.pdf "For all program aspects investigated, the performance variability due to different programmers (as described by the bad/good ratios) is on average about as large or even larger than the variability due to different languages." But I still wouldn't discourage people from learning C and C++. They're not magical fast code juice, but being able to work closer to the machine when it does make sense is obviously better than not being able to. All of the good programmers I know personally can work in at least one of the two. Besides, people deciding to learn C and C++ just might become good enough to beat the machine after all.