[koblas]

While this article is 10 years old, it contains a few very good points -- I've referenced it many times over the last 8 years. Specifically:

-- Scripting languages relative run time and memory consumption overhead will often be acceptable and they may offer significant advantages with respect to programmer productivity.

-- For all program aspects investigated, the performance variability due to different programmers is on average about as large or even larger than the variability due to different languages.