"Squeak/Smalltalk was a deep mysterious world, like coming upon the ruins of an ancient and advanced civilization" is really spot on. If you have some spare tim

"Squeak/Smalltalk was a deep mysterious world, like coming upon the ruins of an ancient and advanced civilization" is really spot on. If you have some spare time and get a hold of a copy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project it's just amazing what they were doing. Unfortunately it looks like the project site is down for the count. As for the rest, it seems very confined to the use of Python as a web programming language, if you try to use many web languages in domains outside of the web you will be writing a lot of things from scratch. Python has multiple competitive web offerings but they form part of a huge landscape of offerings in many areas few can match. I'd go so far as to say the top two languages for "is there a B+ or higher viable library for this random task" would be Python and Java. Clojure's promise is to swiftly address the flaw in all other Lisps by incorporating the Java ecosystem. Programming language research gets an order of magnitude more coverage on HN than it does inside Computer Science as a discipline. It's a simplification, which has nitpicks people can use to derail the argument, but broadly speaking algorithms - in terms of practically being able to import and use them as well as to practically be able to talk and reason about them with other people - are vastly more important than language syntax.