"Writing an operating system is a bit harder than writing a conventional program, by its nature: you're actually writing the code that works the machine and runs other people's code."

Whenever someone thinks about building databases, web servers or other high performance pieces of server software the natural assumption is that it has to be written in C or C++ (or maybe java). The argument is usually something along the lines of only C or C++ provides the necessary performance, scalability etc. I think this is fundamentally missing the point of what makes high performance and highly scalable server software.