As having both, an economics and computer science background, I often feel like economists focus on the wrong metrics when evaluating programming languages.<p>The importance of raw computing speed of a programming language pales in comparison with the importance of the applied methods, as well as the time saved in development. For example, while a speed-up by a factor of two sounds good on paper, the choice of search strategy in a constrained optimization problem can change the running time by several orders of magnitude. I am currently working on a model where the seemingly unimportant choice of price normalization (i.e. which price in the model is set to 1.0 to determine the price level) can make a difference between 2 seconds or 200 seconds of computation time.