I'm really tired of the arguments of X language > Y language. Languages have different purposes. There are times when C++ makes sense, times when C makes sense,

I'm really tired of the arguments of X language > Y language. Languages have different purposes. There are times when C++ makes sense, times when C makes sense, times when Perl makes sense and times when Python makes sense. It's time to stop evangelizing about our tools. Nobody argues that a hammer is better or worse than a screwdriver. That attitude is precisely why a lot of our tools, including programming languages, are crap. It's nice, warm and cozy in the world where no language is better than other, but that world is mostly populated by mediocre programmers. Yes, there are times when language A makes more sense than language B. Especially because when we talk about languages, we're also including the libraries and runtimes that go with them. Here's a ridiculously exaggerated example: ActionScript makes more sense than Lisp when you're developing Flash applications. That is (mainly) because Flash has no support for Lisp at this moment, although you could write your own Lisp compiler for AIR. To use a real world example, C is a lot better match than Java when you have to process an input file with a size of several gigabytes (should be crossing the terabyte boundary nowadays), which contains descriptions of polygons that you have to fracture into smaller primitives (rectangles and trapezoids) and write out a resulting file containing those primitives in a format understood by a specific piece of hardware designed to process it; and you have to do it in a very limited amount of time which keeps shrinking with every version you release to your client. The point I'm making here is that, for most languages, there are circumstances that make a language X the best fit, or at least a better fit than most others. If language Y is the best fit under a set of circumstances that is a lot more narrow than the set of circumstances that makes language X the best fit, then I'll tend to say that "X language > Y language", at least "most of the time". For me, C++ is one of the languages that end up near the bottom of that list, because the circumstances under which I would choose it instead of any other language (such as D, for example) are extremely narrow.