From: Peter Hickman <peter@...>
Date: 2006-09-13T22:06:58+09:00
Subject: Re: Joel Spolsky on languages for web programmingr

It is not just the choice of algorithm that can affect performance, even 
greater performance boosts can be had at the design stage. A bad design, 
ie doing unnecessary work, will cripple any implementation / language. 
If the data being passed through your system is being processed in any 
way that is unnecessary to the task at hand then it does not matter how 
efficiently it is doing that unnecessary task.

When you are looking at systems rather than programs the performance 
boost will come from the design (or architecture as some people like to 
call it). It's a rare designer that can say "we don't need to do that" 
or "that is not a feature, it is an encumbrance". People seem to confuse 
sophistication with complexity. Complexity is bad.

If you take a framework in one language and reimplement it in Ruby then 
it is quite likely that the Ruby version will be much slower, no 
surprise here. However if you take the problem the framework was being 
used to solve and solve it from scratch in Ruby you will get a much 
better result.