I wish I had a good answer to this. I suppose I've never looked at anything else than what I was working with (C, C++, Java, JavaScript and much later CoffeeScr

I wish I had a good answer to this. I suppose I've never looked at anything else than what I was working with (C, C++, Java, JavaScript and much later CoffeeScript) out of "religious" reasons. I guess being really good at what you do can do that to you. I hold CoffeeScript in a very high regard. It has freed me from two things - the spaghetti verbosity of JavaScript, and the abrupt syntax changes of ECMA spec introduced in the recent versions, ones I don't particularly see as a positive development of the language, _especially_ compared to the timeless cleanliness of CoffeeScript. So and I think that CoffeeScript may have thawed me a little towards LISP-like syntax and behavior. I don't know. I think at some point, you realize that you have written (and managed) enough of C/Java-like verbose code and that it's time to try something completely different. So and then it hits you - programming should be data-centric, not language-construct-centric. And that a too big codebase must be a result of ill-specified project scope, more often than not.