Cringely predicts the second coming of Java
I think Cringley is setting up a false dilemma here: that you can have fast or high-level but not both.<p>Lisp has been fast for decades, and modern Common Lisps are roughly the same speed as Java. Lua is a lot like Ruby or Python but about an order of magnitude faster. LuaJIT is <i>another</i> order of magnitude faster, putting it on the same level as Lisp and Java. Haskell is a very different sort of high-level language, but it's fast too.<p>I think he's right that we'll see more people caring about the speed of the implementation language's runtime, but I suspect we'll see more startups picking fast high-level languages or fast runtimes for already-popular high-level languages than going for Java.