Simple patterns for better arguments about programming languages

A nice set of guidelines. I'm glad he goes over the difference between a language and an implementation. Remember, kids, languages are not slow or fast, implementations are. However, languages can be easy or difficult to implement such that the implementation is performant.

I'd love to see a study comparing the time it takes to understand a code base in multiple languages.

I'm pretty sure it's just me given the consensus is against me, but give me an undocumented open source code base written in java/c et al and I can submit good patches within an hour. I can't do the same in ruby/perl with any sort of confidence as there is often magic used. I can write the latter much faster though!

My hypothesis is that the closer you get to math like structures the slower the WPM of understanding. Everyone knows how long it takes to truly understand a math paper - I imagine it's the same phenomena, or perhaps I'm just bad at math :)