[Latty]

I think that good languages offer features that make your code better, not let you write it faster.

Sure, it may take me two months to write that thing in Scala still, but I'll have more confidence it will work well, and it'll be nicer to read, maintain and work with moving forward.

Scala is an interesting example for this, because the language is a grab-bag of features that definitely can be abused by people who don't know better, it's definitely easy to write worse code in it.

The reality is there is an easy blueprint for Java, because C# is Java, but done better. It's moving at a good clip, but the features coming in are very useful and well thought out.

[x0x0]

Not to mention the implicit dismissal of developer happiness. That's one of the best things about the ruby and rails communities: why shouldn't our tools be nice to use? Kotlin has (imo) that same attitude as compared to java.

[crumbles]

> I think that good languages offer features that make your code better, not let you write it faster.

And great languages let you do both.

[brianwawok]

And what do you define as a great language?

Language greatness is pretty subjective and task specific. There are some languages I will never declare great (i.e. PHP, JavaScript, Ruby), but others could be great for different tasks..

[crumbles]

> Language greatness is pretty subjective and task specific. There are some languages I will never declare great

If greatness is subjective AND task specific, then the languages you will never declare great could be considered great by others for the tasks they perform. And by your own admission if they were great subjectively AND for a particular task, that would make those languages great. But, you still claim that you would never declare them great?