It seems like every time I post something bad about a programming language, or compare one language (A) to another (B), at least one commenter lets me know that they like language B better, and furthermore, some aspect of my post has convinced them that language A is so bad that they won't even try it anymore.
The thing is, I don't care.
I'm not a consultant anymore. I'm not trying to sell you anything (unless you need drug discovery software). I'm no longer actively involved in open source community. If you don't want to ever try Ruby (or Smalltalk, or Python, or whatever) it really doesn't matter to me.
When I point out something about a language, I'm just doing it because I genuinely think that it is better than something else.
So how do I really feel about languages?
Well, over the last couple of months I've written code in Ruby, Smalltalk, Javascript, Python (if you haven't read Programming Collective Intelligence you should), Java, and even PHP (SearchMonkey is seriously cool, if you haven't checked it out).
So what language do I think that you should program in?
Even more importantly (from my selfish point of view), learn about things that other programming languages can do that I don't know about.
Then hopefully someday we'll be able to have a discussion about programming languages without resorting to pointless statements like "I still prefer braces over keywords for blocks" and instead we'll get comments that we can all learn something from.
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you should), Java, and even PHP (