>>1
IMO, common lisp suits you more. It's more powerful than scheme, and more complete, if you like. There's a lot of libraries and other code available, and some excellent implementations such as sbcl. Combine this with a good editor such as emacs (and SLIME), which are both free and available for ubuntu linux, and you're all set to write lots of lisp code. For the record, I had used MIT-Scheme back when scheme was to my interest.
>>13
Is exaggerating. But it's not a feature of C to segfault. If the application segfaulted that means it had at least one bug. There's bugs that don't make the application segfault, so these could also reside in the application, though without a visible side. The damage the company will experience if someone finds about those bugs and decides to exploit them is uncomparable to the price of having to buy more expensive hardware to allow the code to work.
>>10
Did they have a reason to use C? Ie had they written the code in some other language and they found out that the bottleneck is the implementation of the language they used? Did they try other implementations prior to the decision of rewriting everything in C?
The reason they failed is because they were incompetent. As such, they did not execute the actions a good programmer would've taken in sequence. However, you did not tell them anything against this. There's two possibilities here, that you did this knowing that they're doing something wrong, or you did this unaware of what they're doing wrong. If you knew, then it's your fault. If you did not know, then you are the biggest asshole I've met yet, because you left them, as you say, when they were in most need for help.
But no; I must admit there's a third case that we did not consider here. That case says that you're completely incompetent unlikely your co-workers it seems. See, the evidence which suggests this is when you mention that the speed gain is small compared to the network latency. That might sound correct at first, but at a closer inspection you fail to realize the true reason one would've chosen to write something in C for cgi: optimal use of resources.
Because with C you get the power to control the system resources precisely the way you want to, which I imagine was the reason they wrote in C, to serve more customers, to make optimal use of the servers hardware. Indeed, if it's anything that a good programmer does is to do what he's been asked and more, in the sense that he writes code better than what he was paid for.
You're one of these: evil, or an asshole, or ignorant of programming. Tell us now, which of the three?