I'm curious, why exactly are languages such as Scala/Erlang/Clojure/Haskell often mentioned as the "end goal" of one's language journey? Is that because they generally allow you to do the most with the fewest lines of code?
I didn't mean it as an "end goal", just as languages which promote different paradigms versus Ruby (actors, functional programming, lisp-ness, etc). They also have different performance characteristics, if you need that sort of thing.
