Coming from a C#/Java background, discovering Smalltalk was an eye-opening experience regarding supposed "legacy" programming languages. I would argue it's a more expressive language with simpler syntax (I dare say the simplest) and has had language features for decades that Java and C# have only recently added. That's how I learned newer isn't always better.
This bit of the article struck a chord with me: "The issue is institutional knowledge — when the people who wrote an application 20 years ago leave, the remaining people often don’t know the application with anything close to the same intimacy."
Code readability, testing practices, and the types of patterns employed (or really the types of anti-patterns avoided) are more important than the language used if you expect anyone to be able to maintain a system over time. These are like embedding artifacts of institutional knowledge in your code to guide future maintainers. The choice of language alone doesn't carry any institutional knowledge.
This bit of the article struck a chord with me: "The issue is institutional knowledge — when the people who wrote an application 20 years ago leave, the remaining people often don’t know the application with anything close to the same intimacy."
Code readability, testing practices, and the types of patterns employed (or really the types of anti-patterns avoided) are more important than the language used if you expect anyone to be able to maintain a system over time. These are like embedding artifacts of institutional knowledge in your code to guide future maintainers. The choice of language alone doesn't carry any institutional knowledge.