I agree with everything you're saying about programming languages having a grain, and of making some things easy and other things hard. That's the general case.

I agree with everything you're saying about programming languages having a grain, and of making some things easy and other things hard. That's the general case. However, the two specifics we're talking about are well-behaved code and consistent code. Most language in theory make it ridiculously easy to re-use code, to make code DRY. Languages like Ruby actually give you more tools for making code consistent than languages like Java. Yet, there is a lot of awful Ruby code and some elegant Java code. I've seen some amazing assembler code. It seems that somehow languages don't seem to have a lot of influence over what we might call architecture. Perhaps the issue is that languages are hand tools, but programs are cathedrals. p.s. If I had to bet, I'd say there is more of a correlation between languages and architecture than a causal relationship. Paul wrote about this some time ago: http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html