[lmm]

> That's quite hard to measure, how do you measure expressiveness?

How much code it takes to express a given idea. I was just talking about my subjective impressions, but I'm sure one could count lines of code.

> That to me will say a lot about a stack's productivity - because quality of documentation, community, stackoverflow questions, 3rd party libraries, general framework architecture etc etc etc..all those things are crucial for productivity.

Depends on what kind of organisation you're in; in the kind of environment I'm working in, how easy it is to get up and running for a quick prototype has surprisingly little to do with longer-term productivity. To the extent that you're actually doing novel programming work, how familiar the syntax is and how available libraries are is actually much less important than how clearly you can think about the problem you're actually solving, and I'd far rather be using a cleaner language with fewer frameworks available. Of course in other cases you're doing things that can mostly be solved by frameworks (indeed that's the original idea behind Rails - it started out as a tool to make stamping out repetitive crud apps easier, and it's very good at that) and in that case the availability of those frameworks is the higher priority.