Ruby Maniac wrote:

> Another favorite argument for those who love slow inefficient
> languages revolves around the feeling that being disk I/O bound means
> the language's performance doesn't matter.  I mean, if the language is
> only being executed 1% of the time and the disk light is on 99% of the
> time who cares how fast the language is because it only gets 1% of the
> CPU. <-- This is an ancient argument without merit these days.

Why does it have no merit? If I am writing an app that needs to write to 
disk transactionally (a pretty common type of app), then the significant 
latency involved in writing to disk is just as much (or more) of an 
issue today as it was in "ancient" times.

http://herbsutter.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2D4327CC297151BB!304.entry