Well optimised computer languages?

Don't they all say that? Today there are hundreds of different languages, so what difference does it make. To find out a competition was launched to code a test function and see how fast it ran in different languages. Each language was compiled and run on the same processor. Now of course there are millions of ways to code a particular function so this is why it had to be a public competition. If you thought your favourite language could beat them then you coded it and submitted it, so the fastest code in each language was compared head to head, with a vast number of entries to get a meaningful comparison. The results were staggering, and not at all what you would intuitively expect.