Many, if not all, languages are defined in large part by their communities. Java is for the unwashed masses, Ruby is undisciplined, monkey-patching lunatics, Haskell is friendly, brilliant, and (for the most part) ignored. It almost seems like languages are just touchstones around which to build a community (by writing libraries, frameworks, etc.). The differences between the actual languages seem much less important that the idioms within the languages.
(For the record: I know Python, MATLAB, Lisp, and Java.)
Many, if not all, languages are defined in large part by their communities. Java is for the unwashed masses, Ruby is undisciplined, monkey-patching lunatics, Haskell is friendly, brilliant, and (for the most part) ignored. It almost seems like languages are just touchstones around which to build a community (by writing libraries, frameworks, etc.). The differences between the actual languages seem much less important that the idioms within the languages.
(For the record: I know Python, MATLAB, Lisp, and Java.)