Haskell, php and Lisp gave me a chuckle in that how much the stereotypes are held up. Although it might just be the feedback loop.
Overall very well written, lots of references and fair disclosure. Fun little project, I might want to repeat this for some other topics like countries.
Visual Basic programmers probably consider themselves professionals and their language little more than a tool to do a job on behalf of a client or employer. Waxing rhapsodic or cussing up a blue streak about your language, or programs written in it, is probably considered highly inappropriate among that crowd (as is wearing anything other than a suit and tie or business dress to work).
This is incredible insightful, and I wish more people thought this way. Computers are just a tool. Sometimes we get caught up in the shiny new toys and pursuit of some theoretical perfection, instead of just getting work done.
I'd bet, for every HN commenter extolling the virtues of some new language, framework or database, there are 10X that many developers quietly hacking away writing boring and ugly VB (and Perl, Java and whatever other languages people consider uncool) code on an ancient MySQL or SQL Server or MS Access database, solving real problems, and getting the job done. Which, in the end, is all that really matters.
(I consider myself a professional, I try to pick the right tools for the job, design maintainable systems, and write clean code, but at the end of the day, I'm paid to deliver value for the business, not build a monument of coding perfection. Life is full of tradeoffs)
While I agree with the sentiment in general, enthusiasm about one's work is not a bad thing. If people didn't get really personal about some of their tools, or unhappy about their current toolset, we'd all still be stuck doing Civil or Fortran - actually, I wonder if even those would exist.
Fortran exists, and it is no more your grandfather's Fortran. It's possible to improve old programming languages and invent new ones at the same time :-)
Overall very well written, lots of references and fair disclosure. Fun little project, I might want to repeat this for some other topics like countries.