Much food for thought in there, as usual.

My only major criticism is that he underestimates the power of good libraries where those libraries keep on being delivered. If available libraries are static, then they are a constant you can discount. If you are cutting-edge, then you are ahead of delivered libraries, and again you can discount. But if you have a good variety of needs and no need to ride the bleeding edge, then a feature like CPAN simply should not be underestimated.

I suspect that he doesn't underestimate this. In previous articles he said that ViaWeb used Lisp for the core, but did various "system programming" pieces in Perl. Which makes sense. Use what makes you most productive for your core that you work on all of the time. Go for the libraries for the random stuff that isn't core.

Cheers,
Ben