There's an astonishing amount of really wise and relevant stuff here six years on. Joel is correct about automatic garbage collection being the big win in the

There's an astonishing amount of really wise and relevant stuff here six years on. Joel is correct about automatic garbage collection being the big win in the PERL / Python / PHP / Javascript / Java / Ruby / Scala / C# / VB language generation. It's still true. C and C++ were always hard to use to develop solid and secure code, and now there's no reason to. He's also right about Microsoft's history of radical compatibility, and how it has faded away. What about developer tools now? VS2010 for C# and Eclipse for Java are pretty equivalent IF you pay extra to augment VS with Resharper. ADO.NET and JDBC are both good now. We have to give MS credit in 2010 for keeping up with open source. But Joel is right about the MSDN faction promoting byzantine solutions to problems. It will be interesting to see how the HTML5 / Silverlight / Actionscript-Flash issues play out. It's going to be hard for the market to support more than two of these.