[lmm]

> You say "reputation" is your measure, but this is nothing more than "group opinion".

One could say the same about e.g. the scientific consensus on a given topic. Ultimately anything nontrivial in today's world relies on other people.

> You responded that professional popularity is not your measure, so C, Java, and Javascript do not receive your approval. Yet they are successful languages.

They are popular but not for their syntax. Their fans and advocates largely admit as much. Plenty of professionals will say things like "I use language X despite its cumbersome syntax, because ...".

> As far as human languages are concerned, your position is untenable. A fluent speaker speaks $language and understands $language in its subtleties. A person who does not speak $language understands little (or perhaps nothing) and is either trying to learn or has installed opinions instead of knowledge.

And yet it's possible to be fluent in multiple languages, and also to study languages in an objective way without being fluent in them. Linguistics is a legitimate field of study with a wide body of existing research (computer language design, on the other hand, has not yet reached that level of maturity).