Why bother hating a language that you never even use? That would be prejudice!

It takes a lot of training, practice, and experience to really hate a language thoroughly.

Could the same thing be said for people?

I'm using it because it's what our founder started with. I joined knowing this because it's higher-level than most languages in use, and we've got smart people and no bureaucracy. That doesn't mean I don't hate Ruby, but I do hate it a lot less than Java.

In fact, I can't think of any case where a project I worked on used a language that I thought was the best abstraction for the problem space. It was what the founder thought would work well, or what the company policy required (I wish I was kidding), or what had bindings to The Library we needed, or had a compiler on the desired platform, or whatever.

When I was job-hunting last, I found zero Lisp jobs in Seattle, and wasn't ready to start my own yet (and really don't want to move to Boston). Next time, I will be, and I'll probably use Lisp exclusively.

Maybe it's time for a "I wish we were using ..." follow-up survey.