[gridlockd]

> There are so many places where computation is far from free and size matters (embedded, HPC for example).

The amount of code where the cost of actual computation isn't vanishingly small relative to memory access is so tiny, it arguably should not dominate the design of a general purpose language.

This wasn't true forty-plus years ago, when these languages were designed, and it's not true on some microcontrollers, but it's generally true today.

The author is completely right in that general purpose languages do virtually nothing to optimize memory access (which is a hard problem), as opposed to optimizing ALU usage (which is relatively easy).