> And if you truly cared about performance over programmer convenience, you'd practice what you preach and build your web apps in hand-rolled assembly
The performance gain from Python/Ruby to Java/Go is an order of magnitude larger than the performance gain from Java/Go to assembly. The productivity loss from Python/Ruby to Java/Go is an order of magnitude smaller than the productivity loss from Java/Go to assembly.
Therefore, going from Python/Ruby to Java/Go might be a good idea for web apps, but going from Java/Go to assembly is virtually never a good idea for web apps.
If you're disregarding programmer convenience in the name of performance, then do it. But once you make the decision to trade off some performance for convenience -- no matter how much or how little you give up/get -- you start losing the high ground for preaching to others about how they should refuse to trade what you see as inappropriate amounts of performance for convenience, because now you're just arguing matters of degree and unquantifiable personal taste.
The performance gain from Python/Ruby to Java/Go is an order of magnitude larger than the performance gain from Java/Go to assembly. The productivity loss from Python/Ruby to Java/Go is an order of magnitude smaller than the productivity loss from Java/Go to assembly.
Therefore, going from Python/Ruby to Java/Go might be a good idea for web apps, but going from Java/Go to assembly is virtually never a good idea for web apps.