| "In my view, programming language choice is cultural yet is always framed as something objective." I think that's an objectively false statement. There are many objective metrics by which a programming language may be evaluated. Conciseness, clarity, suitability for realtime applications, and efficiency come to mind. "It is even possible to "use the best language for the problem"?" It's certainly possible to use a suitable language for the problem. Some problems are more forgiving than others, of course... I will say that the idea of a "general purpose" programming language, suitable for most tasks, is a good one. The current multitude of languages, while fun and good for exploring new ideas, is taking a lot of brainpower away from actually producing working systems. Also, I'll claim that there's no reason that most programs shouldn't be written in an efficient language, and in fact there may be a push for that in the name of datacenter efficiency. It's sad that the most written programming language today is Javascript. |