> What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt?

> People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era.

I'm assuming you're saying these tools hurt more than help?

In that case I disagree so much that I'm struggling to reply. It's like trying to convince someone that the Earth is not flat, to my mental model.

PHP, Ruby and VB have more successful code written in them than all current academic or disproportionately hyped languages will ever have combined.

And there's STILL software being written in them. I did Visual Basic consulting for a greenfield project last week despite my current expertise being more with Go, Python, C# and C. And there's a RoR work lined up next. So the presence gap between these helpful tools and other minor, but over index tools, is still increasing.

It's easy to think that the languages one see mor often in HN are the prevalent ones but they are just the tip of the iceberg.