I think Cringley is setting up a false dilemma here: that you can have fast or high-level but not both.
Lisp has been fast for decades, and modern Common Lisps are roughly the same speed as Java. Lua is a lot like Ruby or Python but about an order of magnitude faster. LuaJIT is another order of magnitude faster, putting it on the same level as Lisp and Java. Haskell is a very different sort of high-level language, but it's fast too.
I think he's right that we'll see more people caring about the speed of the implementation language's runtime, but I suspect we'll see more startups picking fast high-level languages or fast runtimes for already-popular high-level languages than going for Java.
Lisp has been fast for decades, and modern Common Lisps are roughly the same speed as Java. Lua is a lot like Ruby or Python but about an order of magnitude faster. LuaJIT is another order of magnitude faster, putting it on the same level as Lisp and Java. Haskell is a very different sort of high-level language, but it's fast too.
I think he's right that we'll see more people caring about the speed of the implementation language's runtime, but I suspect we'll see more startups picking fast high-level languages or fast runtimes for already-popular high-level languages than going for Java.