Is Hacker News a realm of modesty? It seems to me that there is an implicit assumption here that the world is organized in descending order by programming mastery, something like Lisp/Erland/Haskell -> Ruby -> Python -> Perl -> Java -> VB -> the entirely unwashed.
That's an excellent order of language quality, but:
1. There are more good Java hackers than good Lisp hackers, although the proportion of good programmers is much higher in the Lisp camp.
2. At this point, I'd put Java ahead of Perl for most purposes.
3. There are a lot of smart people who program but, for whatever reason, never become good programmers. Examples would be traders who use VB because it interfaces well with spreadsheets and scientists using Fortran. This shouldn't be terribly surprising; everyone speaks and writes but not all smart people are articulate and good writers.
