This is not the most fair paper (it could be described as: two Haskell language designers kick program-manager-struggling with-pre-STL-C++'s ass) but it's an interesting reading.

It would be great to see this paper's experiment conducted in the modern world. Haskell vs Python vs C++11 vs Clojure vs whatever.

Actually it would be great to have a site like http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/ that focuses on program readability, development speed etc.