Your conclusion may well be correct but I must reject your reasons : 1) we have more (cheap!) hardware capacity than we can shake a stick at so sub-optimal performance is very tolerable and 2) depending on how you measure productivity, i'd argue high level/many layers of indirection languages let you deliver features and value faster than non ball-of-clay languages at the cost of weaker confidence in the code. Which can be mitigated to some extent by more clay :) Personnaly, give me mud over diamonds any day.