>>5
Hold the phone. Just to put you back on track, C if not programmed by a total monkey is as fast as assembly and may be even faster in some cases where a grater level of optimization can be done.
When I am talking of numerics I am thinking of supercomputers. Yes, it only runs one program per processor, but at 99.99% of the CPU load for days and something around 100 programs linked together via MPI or similar. Try to match that with CLI, Java or Python in terms of performance.
Assembly drops out of the scale because the gain of performance (not always true) is degraded by the maintainability. C (more often C++ nowadays) is has about the same maintainability as Java, Python or any other 3. generation language. They differ only in small aspects, whereas assembly is an order of a magnitude. Not to think of independence of the processor.