-- Scripting languages relative run time and memory consumption overhead will often be acceptable and they may offer significant advantages with respect to programmer productivity.

-- For all program aspects investigated, the performance variability due to different programmers is on average about as large or even larger than the variability due to different languages.

All the benchmarks are algorithm and processor intensive, while quite a few applications are idling most of the time. How about a comparison regarding the standard libraries, ease of debugging, external tools, code readability, available support, external libraries, etc. In short - developer productivity.

I'm not saying performance is not important - it is quite critical, but there are other things code does as well (At least most of my code is mundane, and is just calling APIs, updating files, serializing objects, etc. Nothing too fancy.) </rant>

The algorithms described don't seem very clever. I expect you could do much better by splitting the input number into digraphs or trigraphs, sorting those by frequency in the dictionary, and matching the rarest ones first.

And don't give me that line about scaling not mattering, I have to cope with a cantankerous server and database at work, I know full well what my problem sets are.