Some of these articles were originally part of an internal Amazon blog. Apparently Amazon did indeed have tens of millions of lines of C++, and the point of Ste

Some of these articles were originally part of an internal Amazon blog. Apparently Amazon did indeed have tens of millions of lines of C++, and the point of Stevey's rants was to point out that they were doing it wrong. Those were also the days when any respectable application was written in C++. Stevey's other mission was to make it OK to say that C++ sucks without getting looks from everyone like you'd just slapped your mother. These days, sensible people just post a link to the C++ FQA Lite and get on with writing useful code. There's less of a need to fight the machine. In yet another article, presumably more recent, Stevey mentions that after losing faith in Java he started writing everything in Jython. The Ruby craze came later, and these days it's all about JavaScript/Rhino. But each blog rant focuses on the flavor of the week. Point being, these posts aren't "essays", they're propaganda. They're a reasonably well-informed programmer's way of blasting one opinion at a time onto a readership that's already fairly saturated with other kinds of hype -- no room for nuance; Language X is the Next Big Language, repeated for page after page. The language comparisons are just a trampoline for that message.