That view is remarkably well entrenched. On the last team I worked in, before coming to JTV, we were talking about the big Java project we were working on. I said if I had my way it would have been written in Common Lisp. Many on the team thought that was hilarious. One guy's response was "yeah, maybe if we had a supercomputer!"
For what its worth, that's probably a pretty good sign that they don't really understand what makes languages slow. (Or that they in "cheap shot" mode.)
