And yes, it does become natural to ask "why not write CGIs in ASM?" ;-)
Personally, I'd code it in brainfuck, for aesthetic reasons.
And that, nowadays, is generally the state of web development. It's not the language you're using to write it in, it's how efficiently you're using your database. We can probably tweak the system we're testing now and get more from our databases by adjusting how hibernate hits them, and the types of queries that it's throwing, but in the long run, the bottleneck will always be the database server, because we can throw relatively small amounts of money at the other layers if they happen to be bogging down. Not so much with the database.
So, one wonders why some use 70's languages like Java instead of Lisp or Python, which are slower, but a lot more powerful and faster to develop in...
(and don't have hibernate, which is a big bonus) (why do you think I don't like Java ?)
