Just a quick comment. I think the differences go beyond values, to what you might call world views or paradigms (in the Kuhnian sense). Take, for example, the v

Just a quick comment. I think the differences go beyond values, to what you might call world views or paradigms (in the Kuhnian sense). Take, for example, the value of "simplicity". This is extremely overloaded. I doubt the speaker and I would agree on what is simple. I'm not familiar with a lot of the examples they used, but I'm going to guess they would consider C simple and something like Haskell as "not simple". I think that C is familiar but not simple (too much undefined behavior) and Haskell is simple but not familiar; more generally people conflate simple with familiarity. There is a nice Rich Hickey talk "Simple Made Easy" (https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy) on this theme, or a blog post I wrote "Simple is Not Easy" (https://underscore.io/blog/posts/2015/07/21/simple-isnt-easy.html https://underscore.io/blog/posts/2015/07/21/simple-isnt-easy...). Similarly in the discussion of promises. I have written a lot of code using promises---though not in Javascript---and it's fine to debug. Javascript just makes a mess of it because it can't decide on what world view it wants. Is it trying to become a modern somewhat-functional language, which is the direction Ecmascript, Flow, Typescript, etc. are going? Or it is a primarily imperative language? If you go for the former you have very different expectations about how the language operates than the latter. It's notable that most functional programmers (which is my day job) don't make much use of debuggers and the kind of tools the speaker talks about building are not generally valued that much. Now I don't want to give the impression that I think the speaker's world view is wrong. It's just different. Notable though is that we would have fundamental disagreements in how we view the world. It's not that we value, say, simplicity differently. We disagree on how simple is even defined.