Polls like these are amusing but they're not particularly helpful. They broadcast subjective feelings about the "coolness" of languages at the expense of object

Polls like these are amusing but they're not particularly helpful. They broadcast subjective feelings about the "coolness" of languages at the expense of objective evaluation of languages. How many of you upvoted "Go" even though you've never really tried Go, just because you feel like it has got zeitgeist and pizzazz and you're attracted to trying Go? Did you downvote Visual Basic? Have you ever used it? If not, you probably downvoted it because hating Visual Basic is a mark of an Enlightened Programmer; wearing a Visual Basic t-shirt to work would either be a joke or a mark of death. But these are social, subjective, impressionistic evaluations we're talking about. Do the languages actually deserve these judgments? So, if the goal is to propagate and entrench the existing impressions that people tend to muddle around with (because, after all, how many of us really have the chance to deeply learn---deeply enough to form a sound opinion---more than one or two new languages a year?), then mission accomplished. But if the goal is to shed light on the respective value of languages, darkness has fallen.