It might help to look not at languages, but at attributes of languages. For example, garbage collection has gone from an expensive feature in "advanced" languag

It might help to look not at languages, but at attributes of languages. For example, garbage collection has gone from an expensive feature in "advanced" languages to something used in almost every programming language. This is compelling evidence that garbage collection is, in general, a good thing. Or how about the idea of having special syntax for some common data types, like lists and dictionaries and (sometimes) sets? This kind of thing is spreading and becoming more popular, because it really does seem to make people's jobs easier. Some more up-and-coming language attributes include type annotations, more immutability by default, and Erlang-style message passing concurrency. And maybe support for asynchronous I/O, either with JavaScript-style anonymous functions or with coroutines. Some of these things really can make certain programming tasks dramatically easier. The religious arguments tend to be anchored to languages, but there's some real information if you look past that to a deeper level.