The rapid spread of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in recent years has driven the creation of a number of IoT middleware for enabling communication between devices using different standards and technologies. Such middleware facilitates the development of IoT solutions, allowing the developer to handle data and devices through middleware without the need to understand and communicate with each device individually. Although some studies present the performance of middleware solutions, they do not consider the effect of the underlying programming language in the overall performance of the solution. This paper replicates a common middleware use case in three different programming languages, evaluates their comparative performance, and discusses the results found. In the studied use case, Javascript presents better performance for small to medium applications, while, globally, Java demonstrates to be the most robust choice for IoT middleware.