Guillaume Marceau posted an excellent article yesterday that gives a graphical comparison of numerous programming languages. (The page failed to load the first time I tried to load it and it loaded slowly on my second attempt. Be patient and keep trying if it doesn’t work at first.)
It took me a while to realize that the graph axes are the reverse of my expectations. The axes are undesirable quantities — slowness and code size — and so the ideal is in the lower left. Usually comparisons use desirable quantities for the axes — in this case, efficiency and expressiveness — so that the ideal is up and to the right.
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Bill the Lizard 06.01.09 at 07:22
What that analysis leaves out is the amount of time and skill it takes to produce programs that run fast and have a small footprint in various languages. From my own experience I know I can write code that executes faster in C than in Java, but it takes me longer to write almost any non-trivial program in C. It also took me longer to learn the skills necessary to write good C code.