If you just look at the 'best' numbers for each language and treat it as a fight, it's pretty useless. But if you are evaluating a new language it can be very educational to look at all the solutions for that language and see the range of tradeoffs between speed, space and readability. The short and simple programs show you what kind of performance you can expect from straightforward, idiomatic code and the crazy optimised versions show you how far you can push the performance bracket and what you have to sacrifice to get there (performance, safety etc).