The funny thing is, this article by Steve Yegge on programming languages and how (and why) different ones succeed and fail reads a lot like "The Thirty Years War" that I'm reading. One of the primary goals of many developers is not to use the best tool for the job at hand, but to stamp out heresy:

During those years, I wondered why Python wasn't as popular as Perl. It seemed like a much stronger language than Perl. That's just my opinion, of course, and there were certainly things I missed from Perl, so I'm not claiming that Python is the be-all, end-all of language design. But it seemed like the best thing out there.

Why wasn't it more popular? It seemed to be getting crushed by marketing forces -- by fiery-eyed Perl zealots who went around and gained converts, one at a time. Perl was acting like a virus, and spreading rapidly, while Python sort of limped along, growing much more slowly. Richard Gabriel, of course, had already pointed out that C and Unix were virus-like in his famous short essay, The Rise of ``Worse is Better''.

I'm not sure whether I should be amused or depressed, actually.