The author raises interesting points, but none of them are novel. The general tone here seems to be along the lines of: there are just so many moving variables, no fair comparisons may be fairly made. But I judge such positions agains this heuristic: "But, is it actionable?" Pragmatism demands we at least take a glance at languages, frameworks, and platforms from the perfromance perspective.

Here is a practical example: There may be some issues with the Tech Empower web framework benchmarks, but -- across a battery of tests -- one may clearly discern that there are NO python or ruby frameworks in the top 75% performing web frameworks yet plenty of go, Java, and PHP frameworks there. c++, js, amd rust dominate the top 20% and the differences in requests-per-second among them, statistically less significant, literally engulf the total rps numbers for the python or ruby rps totals. If you (or your company) are paying cloud fees for hosting your services (including serverless), you are absolutely throwing money away, perhaps for a "good" reason ('we have a huge rails codebase'), if you ignore this information.

> If you (or your company) are paying cloud fees for hosting your services (including serverless), you are absolutely throwing money away, perhaps for a "good" reason ('we have a huge rails codebase'), if you ignore this information.

It’s worth pointing out that in some cases developer productivity can swamp server cost. It might be reasonable to pay the server bill necessary to develop in Ruby rather than C++, for example.

Obviously the relationship between performance and developer productivity isn’t strictly linear.

I recently wanted to build a serverless application, but as far as I can tell, no serverless platform takes code in C or C++, so I was stuck working in a language I didn't know well.

There may be an opportunity for someone to build a serverless platform that uses verified functions in C/C++/Rust, so you can get both performance and convenience.