Увидел очень глубокую и правильную мысль на его сайте, не мог удержаться и запостил:
The great languages have been the ones that good programmers designed for their own use-- C, Smalltalk, Lisp. The languages that were consciously designed for "average" programmers (Cobol, Pascal, Ada) have tended to be evolutionary dead ends.
http://www.paulgraham.com/design.html
ЗЫ: К Cobol, Pascal, Ada нужно добавить Java и C#.