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.
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.