[adgar]

This is pretty good advice in an entrepreneurial forum where people are most interested in quickly prototyping an idea for the web, showing it to people and finding where to take it and how to change the idea, getting people to look at it who might throw some cash at it, and so on. You're not concerned about high performance or even really quality engineering yet, all the "soft" stuff is way more important.

I'd question its wisdom for engineering-heavy work.

Edit: Also, it makes a bit more sense to posit this:

If you could choose n where your language is n orders of magnitude slower and you are n times as productive with this language were both true which value of n would you choose?

[EwanToo]

For engineering-heavy work (I work in telecoms where a fair bit of work goes into reliability), the choice of language is still pretty low in the importance compared to other decisions.

The language can make things easier (and quicker) to do things the right way, but it'll always be possible to do the wrong thing.