Fetishizing Programming Languages

Technically, of course, these languages are all equivalent because you can write an interpreter for one in another. But that also implies they're not equivalent conceptually; that's what "interpret" means.

The influence of the medium on the program is so acutely obvious to me that I wonder how anyone could miss it. Here's one thing I think obscures it: when we compare programming languages, it's almost always by juxtaposing implementations of a program (or code snippet) that we already know how to write: something clearly defined and well-understood. But this is precisely when you're least likely to be influenced by the medium. (Someone porting, say, the Mona Lisa to watercolor, or fingerpaint for that matter, doesn't have to make big decisions about what to paint: it's clear what the picture should look like because it already exists.) It's when you don't yet know what the program should do, or what direction it should evolve in, that your ideas are going to be deeply conditioned by the medium in which it has evolved so far.

In other words, the way we compare programming languages is designed to overlook all the most interesting and subtle differences between them. Maybe that's why people come to the conclusion that language doesn't matter. Every time I hear that I wonder how deep that person has really gone. One wouldn't think much of an artist who said that medium doesn't matter.

Awful analogy. Software is like capentry (in the small) and architecture (in the large). In both cases materials matter. A language is the material for building a particular kind of structure, not only a tool for building that structure.

Consider the fact that many programming languages fail miserably at concurrency. Is that because you don't know how to use the hammer, or because you picked a really bad material for building that particular kind of structure?

EDIT: Thought about this some more, changed my negative slant on carpentry. Furniture is a delicate and beautiful sculptural practice. In carpentry materials matter just as much.

If you know Python and Perl and you teach yourself Ruby, you probably won't learn very much. If you then teach yourself Lua, Javascript and PHP, you'll learn progressively less each time.

I was surprised to see this particular brand of negativity in the comments. I thought the post was trivial, not controversial.

Example: When you come from a C background and you discover declarative or more specifically functional programming, how is this not a new way to solve problems?

This might be true if you completely diminish the importance of syntax. Likewise, there is a lot to learn from those little gaps between where any two similar languages diverge.