<i>Cough</i> When it comes to describing languages, there's a set of words you should just consider vacuous throat-clearing until <i>proved</i> otherwise. This includes "fast", "powerful", "robust", "easy to [pretty much anything]", "featureful", and a few others. Why is this? It isn't because it's impossible for any of these things to be true; all of them have been true of some language somewhere, even on initial release. It's because <i>every</i> language always claims it.<p>Also, "fast as C" is a slippery little thing; anything can be fast as C on some benchmark with an optimization for that benchmark, being <i>reliably</i> as fast as C and being able to engineer in the confidence that something is as "fast as C" all the time is quite another. Witness the number of people who will vigorously claim that Javascript implementations are "as fast as C", despite in reality not being anywhere near that except in the aforementioned carefully-engineered benchmarks. <i>Especially</i> beware of "adding integers in an array". That's easy to optimize and nowadays says little since everyone optimizes for that case, knowing it's going to be benchmarked.<p>In other news, the latest web framework is "easy to use" and "powerful" and probably "MVC". This is just throat clearing, not a description anymore, because nearly everything is "easy to use" and "powerful" and "MVC". Also, half the libraries posted to /r/$LANGUAGE are "A simple, powerful library for X", which probably translates to "A library I spent about 4 hours on" rather than any sort of increased probability of it being either simple or powerful.