[gnaritas]

> and by necessity I have to disentangle the syntax of the language from the essence of the problem.

Doing that is why programmers prefer different languages, some language allow that to be easier than others do. Some language allow a much more direct expression of the essence of the problem.

> Adding macros and types just shifts how I encode the solution and in no way affects its abstract formulation.

Sure it does, it allows you express the abstract formulation more directly with less syntactic fluff. Ideally you wind up with a DSL that allows the problem to be solved as tersely yet readably as possible.

[Goladus]

In my experience, the more interesting reasons to choose languages come from the "platform and ecosystem" categories rather than syntax.

Lua: It has clean, clear syntax but its real value is the implementation, which is geared towards use as an embedded language.

Javascript: The language isn't bad but were it not for being the browser scripting language it never would have gotten so popular and tools like node.js probably wouldn't even exist.

Java: Native language on the powerful JVM.

C/C++: Direct access to various operating system and hardware libraries not available anywhere else.

Perl: Deployed widely on unix systems making it very useful for scripting and system administration.

SQL: For querying relational databases.

Granted, within each category, you might have syntax preferences. I would never use Ruby or Perl if I could use Python, for example. I prefer JSON for serialization(robust and simple) but for manually encoding a complex data structure, YAML is far more comfortable. That's all syntax. But picking the right language for a job usually requires going beyond the syntax.

[gnaritas]

> In my experience, the more interesting reasons to choose languages come from the "platform and ecosystem" categories rather than syntax.

I agree, but that doesn't have anything to do with what I said. I didn't say anything about choosing a language for a particular job, I said what makes programmers prefer a language which is very much syntax.

> Javascript: The language isn't bad but were it not for being the browser scripting language it never would have gotten so popular and tools like node.js probably wouldn't even exist.

If it were not for being the browser scripting language, it would not exist, so any reasoning beyond what it might have been otherwise is fallacious as it would not have been at all.

> Java: Native language on the powerful JVM.

Nope, portability across platforms made it popular.

> But picking the right language for a job usually requires going beyond the syntax.

Not disputed, but still unrelated to my point which is about syntax. I'm discussing syntax, it's off topic to and rude to tell me not to discuss syntax which is basically what you're doing.

[Goladus]

I was not attacking you. I just used your comments about syntax to make a point more relevant to the thread started here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10183420

[gnaritas]

No worries, I never said you were attacking me.