I also find it interesting that most people on the thread seemed to have missed the important difference between having a shared language and having only one language!
As an English-speaking U.S. citizen who has studied some German and Russian but is fluent in only English, I can say that I am seriously limited by my ignorance of other languages.
As a programmer who programs in several different languages, I am perplexed that people dream of The One True Language.
Today I am likely to write some R, bash, SQL, awk, in addition to javascript. I don't believe that fear of new languages leads people to imagine I'd be better off using Javascript in all these contexts or that Javascript would be better off if it added the features of all these other languages.
I also find it interesting that most people on the thread seemed to have missed the important difference between having a shared language and having only one language!
As an English-speaking U.S. citizen who has studied some German and Russian but is fluent in only English, I can say that I am seriously limited by my ignorance of other languages.
As a programmer who programs in several different languages, I am perplexed that people dream of The One True Language.
Today I am likely to write some R, bash, SQL, awk, in addition to javascript. I don't believe that fear of new languages leads people to imagine I'd be better off using Javascript in all these contexts or that Javascript would be better off if it added the features of all these other languages.