> What you propose would be slow. You can program in BASIC if you want. Just
> don't expect great performance. 

As the goal of programming is, increasingly, the production of network
services, I think the performance equation is being rewritten in some
ways.

Consider Web app servers -- Zope, Vignette StoryBoard, etc. These
things are programmed in Python and Tcl, respectively, so you'd expect
them to be slow. But in the context of a long-running daemon process
that handles HTTP requests and serves up data, it turns out that the 
implementation language matters less than architectural issues, such
as caching. 

I interviewed a user of Bluestone's Sapphire/Web recently. His company
built a "mission-critical" intranet groupware app on this platform.
Even though they had the option, in Sapphire/Web, to literally toggle
between Java and C++, they chose to leave their app logic in Java.
Why? When they monitored the app logic, it hardly made the meter
flicker. The real work was happening in the connection processing, and
in the database processing. 

I claim that the vast majority of new programming that needs to be
done is in the middleware layer. It's business logic, it runs plenty
fast enough for practical purposes when written in script, and it
changes too rapidly not to be written in script.

-- 
Jon Udell | http://udell.roninhouse.com/ | 603-355-8980