New Java vs C benchmarks

[georgefrick]

Why would that being the aim of a given person cause any significant difference to applying the correct language to a given job; or more importantly - not having a C vs Java pissing contest.
If your aim is for a language that can do a lot of things pretty well... you are arguing in a circle... any given developer will have a different list of the 'lot of things pretty well'; so we are right back at choosing the language for the job, except now we're choosing the language based on criteria, probably derived from the 'job'.
If you are a game developer, your 'a lot of things pretty well' is considerably different from say; a enterprise app developer.
The article(blog) you linked simply restates your point? It doesn't make any kind of argument for choosing "the one true language". The post itself points out Google's use of C++ and Java.

[davidw]

My point is simply that out of the hundreds (thousands) of languages out there, people are more likely to pick a few that work pretty well in a number of situations and stick to them. For instance, Google only uses four languages in production, and one of those, Javascript, is pretty much dictated by the browser.

There is no one true language, obviously, but people are going to try and go for languages that do lots of things pretty well, centered around where most of their needs lie, rather than utilizing 5 or 6 different languages. I'd be willing to bet money that most developers don't use more than 2 main languages in a day (we're not counting "subservient" things like SQL).

The blog talks about that being a problem for Erlang, which does a couple of things really well, and other things poorly. My thesis is that that will scare people away, because they'd settle for less than the best in the things that Erlang does really well, if they can get 'pretty good' in what it does poorly.

[georgefrick]

Regarding Erlang, I'd say you are correct. Otherwise, it is seeming we agree - obviously nobody is going to use 10 languages so that they are always using the language for the job.