Languages, and even syntaxes, do matter. In a lot of ways and not all of them are immediately obvious. Personally I went from "languages matter" to opposite an

Languages, and even syntaxes, do matter. In a lot of ways and not all of them are immediately obvious. Personally I went from "languages matter" to opposite and back again during the years. At the beginning I used C and then I started learning C++. At that point I had some experience with Pascal and BASIC and by comparison C++ looked like the undisputed winner. At this time I assumed that "languages matter" (or rather "C++ matters", but close enough). In the following years I learned a couple more languages. Ada, PHP, Python, Java. This is where I started believing that languages don't matter - they of course differ from one another, but the differences are minimal. But I didn't stop there. I started learning more and more languages, some really, really different. I first learned OCaml, then Erlang, then Prolog, then Scheme. Then more than a dozen of other languages, including Clean, Smalltalk, J, Forth and other such "esoteric" ones. I don't remember exactly when it happened, but somewhere along the road I realized, again, that languages do matter. There are two parts to this realization actually. One is that I started doing programming professionally - this caused me to interact with other programmers, to read their code, to explain things to them. I realized that language design has to accommodate large variety of people's habits, projects and circumstances and that not everything is completely rational when it comes to language usage "in the wild". That language design has non-trivial impact on language community (and language syntax on idioms/best practices) and that community matters very, very much. And the second part was that, as mentioned, I finally learned some languages which really were different. There are many notable differences between Pascal and C, for example, but they are not that great. On the other hand C, Smalltalk and J don't have almost anything in common and they all have specific niche where using one of them is clearly a win. In the end I concluded what I said at the beginning of this comment: that languages do matter and in many different ways at that. Some make thinking about certain problems easier, some make writing certain kind of software easier, some make learning particular concepts easier and some make earning money easier. Some differ more, some less, but - outside of purely theoretical discussions - you can't pretend that they don't. Or that the differences are negligible.