The "C is Efficient" Language Fallacy

Maybe a week or so ago I stumbled upon an article via reddit called "Programmer's rant: what should and should not be added to C/C++". It was a terrible article. The author had some pretty bad misconceptions on how to produce fast code, which was what the article was most about. I just couldn't let that stand unchallenged so I wrote a comment which you can find if you scroll down on the page of the article. I will not repeat is here. If you're interested go to the page instead.

I was rather frustrated by the fact that this story had made it to the front page of reddit. Therefor I was pretty happy to see that a few days later there was another story on the front page debating the above article: The "C is Efficient" Language Fallacy. He makes pretty much the same argument as I did but he writes a lot better and have some good concrete examples.

The bottom line in both my comment and the other article is that functional languages are catching up pretty quickly when it comes to speed.