[ludovicianul]

How do you measure "mediocre"? And what do you mean by inefficient? In any language you can code 99% of the things needed by 99% of most of the systems. Most of the "I love/hate this language" is usually subjective perception or strong preference for certain programming paradigms: people loving/hating OOP, people love/hating verbosity and so forth.

[tomxor]

You don't, it's all opinion, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

We can at least all agree there is difference in the efficiency of writing a program in binary opcodes for a specific architecture vs writing one in C... although quantifying it is impossible, and that's just one quality.

[ludovicianul]

Leaving the low level languages aside, most of the top level one can achieve the same things with similar costs. It's still up to the individual/team skill how those apps/systems end up to be built. If some project fails, is rarely "picking the wrong language" reason...