Miguel de Icaza: "Although raw performance is good for some applications they impose a heavy toll on the developer. A professionally written and hand tuned assembly language program will likely perform better than anything else generated by a compiler.

The language and runtime choice is a tradeoff that developers make. A balance between the time available for releasing the product; the budget available for creating and maintaining the application; the target system requirements; any third party libraries and components required; the in-house expertise; availability of developers with knowledge to develop and maintain the code; language learnability; the project life-span and the requirements that it might impose on the project: from languages designed to maintain software over a large period of time to write-once, barely-touch-afterwards software."