You make very good points. It's obviously very difficult to quantify the differences between programming languages. And yes, I agree, it leads to imprecision wh

You make very good points. It's obviously very difficult to quantify the differences between programming languages. And yes, I agree, it leads to imprecision which in turn leads to biased results. I still think it shouldn't stop us from doing the exercise anyway. We might draw "whatever conclusion we like about" it, but it's still a way to move forward. The wiki page in the original link is not trying to convince the reader of anything (or at least the first few posts). It's a user sharing his or her insight on his experience with Lisp. It resonated with mine. Reading this helps me put words on something I've been feeling for a while. We might both be wrong, but at least it helps me in some way. What I'm trying to say is that languages may be equivalent (Turing!), they're not exactly equal. Our inability to measure the differences with precision should not prevent us from comparing experiences. I am not interested in adopting the manager's point of view of "which language should be best for my project/team?"; I'd rather take the young pupil's point of view of "let's discover how these guys do it". After all, I'm a younger (in programming years) than many people around here. Your original comment seemed to imply that a language's worth is tied to the popularity of the platform running it. I personally find this aspect the least interesting in programming languages. Maybe because I'm not an entrepreneur and I don't necessarily feel like one.