His argument now seems to be that you have to use C for speed. In my experience that doesn't necessarily hold true anymore, given modern computer architectures

His argument now seems to be that you have to use C for speed. In my experience that doesn't necessarily hold true anymore, given modern computer architectures and what JIT compilers are capable of. I have several times written something in a modern language and then convinced myself that I could get a large speedup if I instead wrote it in C, only to discover that the speed benefits were minimal at best and would require an exorbinant amount of exquisite hand optimization to increase further.