Yea, I'd expect Spectrum readers to disagree. It's a generational thing, and working EE's started dropping Spectrum and/or IEEE membership when the IEEE started employing liberal arts majors to write the articles in it. That started in the early 90's. By the end of the 90's, I couldn't stand it any more, and I dropped my IEEE membership. There were times I called the IEEE to rant about the stuff in Spectrum, it was so bad, but they just told me to go pound sand.

Every now and again, when I read Spectrum (or any of the IEEE journals) I'm struck by how academia-focused the IEEE has become. It used to be much less so back in the 70's and early 80's.

To me, Python is Yet Another Scripting Language That Wishes It Could Be Lisp. That's about it. For decades now, there's been this contingent of software people who love the power and flexibility of Lisp, but they have some sort of congenital brain defect that prevents them from typing more than two parenthesis without having a grand mal seizure. When I'm playing around on my own, I'd rather use Lisp. I can compile it, I can run it inside an environment, I can do pretty much anything I want with it. One of the neatest environments I ever used was the Symbolics Lisp Machine environment - oh, was that slick.

But time marches on, and every year, someone comes out with the New Language To Rule Them All.  The current language I really like for compiled code is Swift, which brings in some features from Common Lisp like closures, which are pretty neat to find in a compiled language. 

My only other rant about languages is this: I'd love to see C++ outlawed, and Ada mandated on any project that has a significant public safety exposure.