There are no bad programming languages, only bad programmers

There are plenty of terrible programming languages. Programming languages are designed to solve problems, so a language that fails to solve any problems (or solves only a very specific problem with limited application) fades into obscurity - it still exists though, and is still bad.

Searching thedailywtf.com for the term "proprietary language" comes up with some fun stories (MUMPS, Labview, etc).

Having taken a compiler design course in college which involved attempting to create a simple proprietary language, I can attest that attempting to write a programming language will result in bad far more often than good. The halls of any computer science program are littered with terrible language experiments that barely function, mine included.

To extend the chef analogy the author uses; a good chef may be able to make a palatable dish out of rotten meat (isn't that what curry was invented for?), but the meat is still rotten.

This whole essay feels like a strawman. "All [databases] do is push and pull bytes from the disk, right?" Has any working programmer ever thought that?

I'm a blub programmer, but I've used a number of languages over the years - and not sequentially, either, so I don't think my observations are due to a changing overall experience level - and in my experience, it's unambiguously a lot easier to be productive in some languages than in others.

Missing from the author's initial analogy - "Give an experienced cook a dull knife. The blade slips and he cuts himself" - is the fact that an experienced cook will know the blade is dull and respond accordingly.

My response to the title: You have obviously never worked with Classic ASP. Time to read the article...

You can write Fortran in any language. :-P