>>8
I'd like to keep my fucking sanity, thank you very much.
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Also, unless you want to learn assembly out of pure geeky curiosity (the best kind!) you'd be better off studying ALGORITHMS and discrete mathematics (O-notation!) if you care that much about program optimization.
Only bad programmers blame bottle necks on the language. Certainly if you pick a slower language like perl (I have no experience with perl so if it's actually quite fast forgive me you perl monkeys. I just picked it because it's an interpreted language and if there's some obscure compiler for it kindly stfu, I don't care, even php has a compiler nowadays. Long comment is looooooooooooong.) you might run into a "language bottleneck" but if you need speed you've obviously went outside of perls intended use in the first place.