“If we didn’t care about speed, it might make sense to use Python, Ruby, or many other scripting languages.”
I love this fallacy. It’s the classic language speed is more important than programming speed fallacy. That used to be true, it isn’t any more.
Let’s say we have to write a program to analyse a data set and report it to our boss. Jeff starts the program in C++ and I start writing it in Python.
It takes me two days, it takes Jeff three. Let’s say my program takes ten times a long to run than Jeff’s. Jeff’s takes two hours, mine takes twenty. Even so, I’ve still beaten Jeff.
I’m still a day cheaper than Jeff too. Twenty hours of CPU time is much less than one day of work time. We charge a day of development at roughly a thousand for a day. I can get a cheap PC for around 300 plus 0.10 of electricity. I’ve still got 700 more than Jeff.
It’s even worse, let’s say that the reason my program is slower than Jeff’s is because of two or three slow routines. I can factor those routines out and write them in C++. This task might take a couple of hours. My program is now just as fast and I’ve still beaten Jeff.
You’d have to be nuts to use C or C++ on new project.