[wainstead]

Really, any of the scripting languages.

My recollection is there was a lot of disdain for scripting languages because they could not match the speed of C or other low level languages. Today, computer speed is so many orders of magnitude faster it’s hard to believe the speed of scripting languages was ever an issue.

John Ousterhout’s paper on programmer productivity gains comes to mind:

https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/scripting.pd...

[adrianN]

Just a few days ago I wrote a simple awk script to parse some log files but it was horrendously slow. I had to replace understandable loops with weird calls to builtin functions to make it fast enough for my usecase.

[dublin]

You're doing something wrong. I've used awk to run big data reformatting jobs in under an hour that took most of a day to run in Scala on an Apache Spark cluster. In the vast majority of cases today, if speed is your problem, then you are the problem - especially since most problems fit into RAM these days, even w/o exotic stuff like RAMcloud...

[unhammer]

try mawk, I've had it run 4x faster than gnu awk on some things.

[segmondy]

This! It was not unusually to have 100folks sharing a 20mhz workstation. Trying to run interpreted language was a pain! Heck, even compiling a few hundred line C code would take seconds.