After a long and painful apprenticeship, you finally realize that being a great programmer has nothing to do with the language or its features. You get to the point where you're completely done learning this or that new technique (which, by the way, is nearly always an old thing for someone else). Your "profound enlightenment experience" with Lisp is ten years old; your copy of Design Patterns looks like an old Bible; you've had dozens of dirty weekends with stack-based languages, declarative languages, experimental languages, etc. You've been all of those places and done all of that. Many, many times.
At that point, the pros on cons have fully evened out, and what you want is a tool that you can completely and totally master. You've stopped searching for tools without warts, edge cases, and gotchas, because you know those do not exist. What matters is community, ancestral memory, stability, maturity, docs. Above all, you just want to build something really great.
It is at that point that you become that guy. You might well turn to C, as many before you have. Maybe, maybe not. Lots of us have.
We aren't crusty old neanderthals, though. We're just at the logical end of the process.
But hopefully you will, and I can tell you why.
After a long and painful apprenticeship, you finally realize that being a great programmer has nothing to do with the language or its features. You get to the point where you're completely done learning this or that new technique (which, by the way, is nearly always an old thing for someone else). Your "profound enlightenment experience" with Lisp is ten years old; your copy of Design Patterns looks like an old Bible; you've had dozens of dirty weekends with stack-based languages, declarative languages, experimental languages, etc. You've been all of those places and done all of that. Many, many times.
At that point, the pros on cons have fully evened out, and what you want is a tool that you can completely and totally master. You've stopped searching for tools without warts, edge cases, and gotchas, because you know those do not exist. What matters is community, ancestral memory, stability, maturity, docs. Above all, you just want to build something really great.
It is at that point that you become that guy. You might well turn to C, as many before you have. Maybe, maybe not. Lots of us have.
We aren't crusty old neanderthals, though. We're just at the logical end of the process.