[tchauchkes]

Who cares about the "technical merit" (which is a completely arbitrary measure) of a language? There IS no "objectively better" language. Not everything is on a scale ranging from 0 to LISP.There are different tools for different jobs, each has performance characteristics along different dimensions.

There is only one question that matters to developers: Is this productive?

By that measure, the language itself is a small part of the equation which includes tooling, libraries, community, documentation, etc etc etc. This is completely normal and not depressing. It's sane.

[Silhouette]

Who cares about the "technical merit" (which is a completely arbitrary measure) of a language?

Anyone who wants to produce good software efficiently, one would hope.

There IS no "objectively better" language.

Of course there is.

Language A and language B let you write identical code to solve a problem correctly, but language B does not admit a certain class of programmer error where language A does.

Language A and language B let you implement identical designs, but in language A you can do so concisely with direct semantic support, while language B requires 5x as much code and a load of boilerplate idioms.

There are different tools for different jobs, but sometimes there are also better tools for doing the same job.

There is only one question that matters to developers: Is this productive?

I'm not sure I agree with that, but in any case, it is purely the developer's perspective. There are many other questions that might also matter to someone who uses the software. Does it give the right answer? Does it run efficiently? Is it safe? Will those things still be true next year? These things all affect the value of the software, and if nothing else, that should make any commercial developer consider whether a better product would be worth more in the market.

[cylvers]

There IS no "objectively better" language.

Of course there is.

I agree that that there are objectively better and worse languages. (brainfuck is a kind of proof of conception for this, right?)

I think, however, that comparing languages is much more complicated and difficult than most people allow for. Most comparisons are made on the basis of a few issues that the comparator happens to care about, ignoring many other possible methods of comparison.

We've all experienced this when advocate of language x completely misses the point in his critique of our own favorite languages. These reductionist comparisons naturally lead to distrust of all comparisons of languages.

Knowing that there are better and worse languages does not necessarily give us the ability to determine which languages are better and which are worse.