
This article discusses a small-scale benchmark test run on nine modern computer languages or variants:
Java 1.3.1,
Java 1.4.2, C compiled with
gcc 3.3.1,
Python 2.3.2, Python compiled with
Psyco 1.1.1, and the four languages supported by Microsoft's
Visual Studio .NET 2003 development environment:
Visual Basic,
Visual C#,
Visual C++, and
Visual J#. The benchmark tests arithmetic and trigonometric functions using a variety of data types, and also tests simple file I/O. All tests took place on a Pentium 4-based computer running Windows XP.
Update: Delphi version of the benchmark
here.
I suggest he should benchmark Common Lisp (perhaps using Corman Common Lisp, Allegro or LispWorks on Windows). Common Lisp is a native-compiled language which provides even more dynamism than the popular interpreted languages like Perl, Python, Ruby and PHP. It's not hard to learn for someone used to these languages and may provide a nice surprise for the benchmark results.