>>47
Bleh. Even if we assume that's true, there's nothing wrong with creating a virtuous cycle for a language branch.
Language starts with low abstraction and high speed -> speed makes it popular -> popularity makes developers improve tools (compilers, debuggers, profilers) -> speed increases and writing in the language becomes easier -> popularity increases -> ...
The point of CPUs is to execute as many operations as possible in as little time as possible. If there's one language branch which is incredibly popular, it means more code will be written in it. If, say, 90% of all code is written in that branch, it's just common sense that you'll want your hardware to run that code as fast as possible.
Back when Lisp was more popular, some companies began manufacturing Lisp machines that were capable of running Lisp efficiently. If you were coding for speed, writing in anything other than Lisp for those machines would be stupid.