I find it interesting to hear people say 'language doesn't matter' (and similar, 'it's not important'), in general (because often the same people then, when asked what language they develop in, turn around and say that they 'use multiple; we always use the right tool for the job'), but in this article it's especially interesting given it's right after "and here are the things I learned, and the things that I have not grokked yet in this language".<p>While there is a certain truth to there being no inherent reason why you can't use an idiom or practice learned from one language in another, it's incredibly disingenuous to then say the language isn't important (and that it's only the concepts learned). The language is what encourages you to think in certain ways, and it helps you code along those ways, while making it difficult to code in others.<p>I recently went from having coded in Erlang almost exclusively for two years, to coding something small in Java, and I can't even express how irritating I found the experience. A part of it was writing a combination function (i.e., given a collection, generate every combination of elements). In Erlang it was the work of but a moment, and resulted in 3-4 lines, that were incredibly readable. I then attempted to convert it back to Java...and what do you -mean- collections are all destructive?! Ugh, I have to manually copy them out for this to work?! Etc. So much pain. Java got in the way of writing it cleanly, and when I looked for solutions online written in an idiomatically Java way, I found even more verbose solutions, that tended not to be as reusable (involving explicit nested loops rather than recursion, or recursion rewritten with a while loops; i.e., a collection of 5 items would have 5 loops and not be reusable for a collection of 6 items).<p>Quite simply, using a language with idioms from another language, while possible, is often times intensely painful, with a whole new slew of not well known caveats (since most developers in that language aren't using it that way), to where if you know you are going to develop a specific way, you will be far better served to use a language that supports it naturally.<p>And his takeaway at the end isn't in any way relevant to the title of "Language Is Not Important".