I found the opposite in a very real-world analysis of my hobby project to build a digital dashboard for my DeLorean. I spent 5 years making very slow progress with C++, and then switched to perl, started mostly from scratch, and finished in a year. I gave a talk about this exact topic at YAPC 2014: https://youtu.be/SERH3_gZOTo?t=1018 The CPU usage on the embedded PC went from 15% to 40%, but in the grand scheme I'd rather have it finished and pay a little more for the hardware.
