Congratulations on making it through seven programming languages. Perhaps you’re expecting me to pick winners and losers in this chapter, but this book is not about winners and losers. It’s about discovering new ideas. You may have been like me early in my career, buried deeply in commercial projects in large teams with little imagination, the software factories of our generation. In such a world, my exposure to programming languages was extremely limited. I was like a 1970s movie lover in a small town with one theater, getting only the big-money blockbusters.
Since I started building software for myself, I feel like I’ve just discovered independent films. I’ve been able to make a living coding Ruby, but I’m not naive enough to think Ruby has all of the answers. Just as independent films are advancing the state of the art in movie making, emerging programming languages are changing the way we think about program organization and construction. Let’s review what we’ve seen throughout the book.