@John: Raspbian is not a hobby OS. As someone who has built several dozen Linux systems from scratch (meaning 100% compiled from source) I have a great deal of admiration for the Raspbian team. And really enjoyed using it (with no GUI).
@Jalih: You make excellent points regarding strings, but 8th is not at a disadvantage here. Just about EVERY programming language has the same issue with the default string implementation. That's why StringBuilders came to be, but not every language has that (I'm looking at YOU, Python. And for good measure, ScriptBasic).
A good StringBuilder just minimizes the amount of allocations required, AND doesn't simply do an allocation of space as needed and then a copy of the data (both are expensive time wise), but an actual move of the data into the reallocated (or newly allocated) buffer.
I said it before, the string challenge is a good opportunity for checking and optimizing how strings are put together, especially with either large data sets or with a large number of smaller strings being added sequentially to put together a final or master string. I don't know about you, but I've enjoyed trying to get each language I've submitted to efficiently accomplish this. And still have a few tricks up my sleeve that I haven't tried yet...
AIR.