I am not sure that's a useful criterion in practice, though. People are fond of saying that languages will not make you orders of magnitude more productive, and I think the corollary is that on average they will not make you orders of magnitude less productive either. (Controlling of course for characteristics of problems and such.)

The problem is that there's not really a great way to reason about this, either. If you're talking about how long it takes to write a program in C vs Java, how do you measure time spent writing code vs debugging vs bug fixing, et al?

All in all it's certainly possible it takes longer to write code in C, but for all anyone knows, writing more reliable code up front means fewer bugs later on. Code which is more performant by default may lead to fewer performance regressions when someone induces pathological GC behavior. Contrariwise, there's stuff like memory corruption as the OP describes, which is probably way more difficult in a native environment instead of a hosted one.

It's hard not to reach the conclusion that we're all just talking out of our hats anyway (myself included).