After seeing this a couple years ago I started to be more responsible for my PHP code, writing it even with the slightest micro-optimizations possible, since more times people use my code (especially due to nature of PHP being executed in every http request), more energicity they waste because of my lazyness and more they pollute the planet. JIT was NOT included in this experiment, so the number can be much more lower.
I hope you will be responsible for your code so on too (generally I mean people using interpreted languages).
99% of my code is in perl. My local power source is 100% hydroelectric. I therefore choose to believe that nuclear energy would result in my code quality improving.
"Modern Perls are supposedly faster" I thought, until I checked and apparently they used a very recent Perl.
So now my denial is along the lines of "Well they're asking Perl to do things it doesn't need to, like implementing merge sort and binary trees, and, and!, TIMTOWTDI! They're probably choosing a slow way to do things too!"
The other denial idea was: "Interpreted languages offer rapid prototyping and easier debugging, which saves energy during the development process, and that isn't being taken into account here."
...but then I see the ridiculously low scores for JavaScript. I wonder if Perl (or other interpreted languages) had received the amount of scrutiny and attention that JS has had in order that browsers remain relatively fast, whether it would be any faster now.
Don't know, and to be frank I don't feel so strongly about it either. I use perl because it's the language I happened to become fluent in some twenty years ago, and nowadays when I want to put together a simple utility script in python I usually just say "meh, fuckit" after ten minutes and finish it in perl instead.