David Allsopp <dra-news <at> metastack.com> writes:

-snip-
> Reducing an entire programming language's strengths (or
> weaknesses!) to a single number is just not really realistic - the truth is
more complex than one
> single-precision floating point number (or even an array of them) can
describe. (NB. The shootout
> doesn't claim that the final ranking displayed is anything other than a score
of how well the languages did
> at the various benchmarks given - but a graph like that is easy to interpret
erroneously in that way)
-snip-


That summary page 

> > (http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-languages-are-
> > fastest.php)

shows box plots (quartiles, outliers, median) of the normalized timing
measurements for each of the tasks, for each of the language implementations.

A graph like that shows some of those language implementations are very fast for
some benchmark programs and very slow for others.

To characterize that as "reducing an entire programming language's strengths (or
weaknesses!) to a single number" seems kind-of misleading.

Especially when the question that page answers is stated 3 times - "Which
programming language implementations have the fastest benchmark programs?"