[pstuart]

Perl had less competition and also suffered from being more of a "write-only" language.

Lisp, Haskell, OCaml all likely tickle your PL purity needs, but they remain niche languages in the grand scheme of things. Does that make them bad?

I think Go will be the new Java (hopefully without the boilerplate/bloat). It's good enough to do the job in a lot of cases and plenty of problems will be solved with it in a satisfactory manner.

Language wars are only fun to engage with for sport, but it's silly to get upset about them. Most languages have value in different contexts and I believe the real value in this dialog is recognizing when and where a language works and to accept one's preferred choice may not always be "the one".