Too many languages

There are thousands of programming languages.

The purpose of a programming language is to express programs. The
purpose of learning programming languages is to build up a toolbox for
reasoning about and synthesizing programs in any one given language.

There are diminishing returns on learning programming languages, and
time is scarce.

Therefore one must select between programming languages to study.

A good selection of languages has both
+ breadth
  + satisfies a number of real world economic needs.
+ focus
  + exploits similarity between languages and incremental learning.
  + some unifying basis

A good member of a particular selection meets a number of the
following criteria:
+ Satisfies one particular school of thought on programming languages.
+ Significant difference from predecessors
+ Significant influence on successors
+ Economically significant
+ Advanced i.e. no direct, established and proven heir.
+ A good language.
  + Easy to express programs with
  + Easy to read programs expressed with
  + Easy to reason about programms expressed with

No one of these criteria are sufficient or even necessary conditions.

A bad member satisfies the opposite criteria.

>>17
It also turns out all those good posts on Common Lisp, or the ones pointing out the flaws in Scheme, Python and Haskell: Nikita.

The ones about J, Forth, Smalltalk: Nikita.

It seems pretty much everything I liked about /prog/ was just the one guy.

The rest of you are UNIX skiddies who think programming in C is ``hardcore'', Haskell is for smart people, minimalism is cool and ``OOP'' sucks.

That being said there are differences. For example I'm not so averse to the ALGOLs (well its love hate really). I also have a thing for CAS style term-rewriting, which I don't know if Mr. Sadkov has discovered.

I also don't seem to have much in common with Nikita outside of programming interests and languages. I certainly don't share any of his political or personal views.