"I couldn't really learn Erlang, 'cos it didn't exist, so I invented it"

Just for a moment, consider who this man is and what he has done. We would all do well to take a step back and consider his manner of response. Notice that he continued learning new languages after creating Erlang (instead of just evangelizing it at the one true language). He did not immediately say "choose these three languages" as if they were the only ones you could possibly learn.

Does it really help our profession/hobby at all if we engage in language-elitism and snark? Even on Hacker News I've seen vitriol directed at Ruby, Python, Javascript, Haskell, to name a few recent targets. All languages have their place, even if that place is only as a lesson for future language designers.

Encouraging people to build stuff, whatever the language, whatever the library, whatever the framework; that is what we should be doing. IF someone wants suggestions, or help deciding what to use, that is fine, but criticizing someone for the language or framework they use has become all too common and a stain on the character of our community.

That's not to say honest criticism is unwelcome: All languages/libraries/frameworks/software can improve. But to belittle people for the choices they make, or to segregate ourselves into voluntary language-ghettos we are compelled to stay in by the force of public opinion...that goes against the spirit of what people like Armstrong worked hard to build. Maybe it started with "Worse is Better", maybe it started with alt.religion.emacs being taken a little too seriously, but it has been perpetuated by all of us, even Paul Graham (in Beating the Averages).

At some point, this has to stop. We, as a community, must grow to support the betterment of hacking by creating and encouraging creation; not by petty vitriol and conformism based on fashion.

Now, I've strayed pretty far from the point of the post itself, but Armstrong closed with such a salient point: If we stopped bickering so much about what is the "right language", "right framework", "right library" and instead encouraged particular protocols and documentation standards we'd all be better off for it.

Javascript is a very different language from Python. It is in some ways more flexible and less prescriptive. You point out one of the non-overlapping use cases. Javascript performance has seen really intensive efforts. Javascript has grown a rather nice async ecosystem that Python just doesn't have. It's also exciting for people from the standpoint that everything feels newer and more up for grabs. Python is a rather old language.

Any language is Turing complete so the big deal is a matter of style and tools and libraries and ultimately it's who you are working with and what you want to do.

Javascript has some unique concepts, while Ruby or Pyton are just mix of features also present in Smalltalk or LISP. So learning Ruby has no added value if you already know those.

If he were talking about actually thinking about programming techniques I'd agree but here he's talking about languages, and while the languages he lists are sufficiently different, saying it'd take years to master lisp after working in ML, or learning Javascript after knowing C. After the first couple of languages learning new abstractions shouldn't really take that long.

In an ideal world easy programming solutions can be easily explained in the right language. We're not quite there yet but doing quicksort in ML doesn't require 5 years experience.

> Even on Hacker News I've seen vitriol directed at [...]

To be fair, the author himself is pretty vitriolic about C++:

"I saw C++ coming and read the book - or at least tried to read the book - there's a dent in the wall behind my piano, where the book hit the wall - Improvements to C should make things easier not more complicated, I thought"