Peter Norvig:

[Programming] language choice is not as important as all the other choices: if you have the right overall architecture, the right team of programmers, the right development process that allows for rapid development with continuous improvement, then many languages will work for you; if you don’t have those things you’re in trouble regardless of your language choice.

It frustrates me when I hear people dismiss the differences between computer languages. There really isn’t any difference between languages, the argument goes, because “all Turing complete language differ solely on syntactic sugar.”

That’s a direct quote from part twelve of Michele Simionato’s excellent The Adventures of a Pythonista in Schemeland, but I’ve got no beef with his articles. Like I say, they’ve been an excellent introduction to Scheme for me. However, I’ve seen this particular assertion – “all programming languages are the same because they’re all Turing complete” – used repeatedly as long as I’ve been a programmer. It drives me nuts.