Comment by KirinDave

This is absolutely not true. A lot of great work has been done in the past decade on interpreters and speeding them up. Modern interpreters are just compilers where you use the code immediately (most are direct threaded byte-code interpreters), so all that work counts.

It is strange that modern software engineering en masse took such a huge step backwards in the C++ era of the late 80's and early 90's, with tools falling back to primitive levels and languages becoming much less forgiving. It's only now that we're finally returning to the state of the art from 20 years ago.

Of course, some people bucked the trend and used these somewhat neglected technologies despite a lack of public popularity. Paul Graham is one of them, and he ended up doing pretty well for himself. :)