Huge problem with the conclusion, and it is something mentioned in the article. It is suggested to view the language choice as an economic decision. But guess what, that is already what the decision makers think they are doing.

There's another almost-got-it in the article. He is suggesting people tie their identity to their programming language of choice. This seems odd to me, because we tend to think of identity as think like religion or ethnic group, not sub-professional groupings like neurosurgeon or devops, and certainly not specific to tooling ("I'm a DeWalt carpenter!")

The missing connection is back to economics. If I've spent a bunch of time coding .NET, it's going to cost me something to code Java or python. This is the actual economic conversation being had. People will have to learn a new toolset, while having deadlines over their heads.

The solution is actually this: You hire people who are language-agnostic.

I used to spend a LOT of time in VBA, and then .NET. I was daunted by making the jump to C, then c++ and python. Only over time did I overcome the nerves and move on with Java, Kotlin, Elixir, js, and Rust. It was an eye-opening experience that you could do this. Just make the leap, and you find it wasn't that far.

If you don't have people who have done this a few times, you will get resistance, and the real resistance is they don't think it's worth it to put in the hours to learn the new tools. They come up with all sorts of justifications for why things are fine with the old tools.

You'll also become a language lumper if you do this. I don't really think there's a lot of language features. The main ones are GC vs manual memory, strong vs weak type, imperative vs declarative. Once I had a few points on these axes, a lot of things eased when it came to new languages.

> certainly not specific to tooling ("I'm a DeWalt carpenter!")

I'm not sure that's a correct analysis of their situation. Yes, if you hand a perfectly spherical DeWalt screwgun to a Nikita carpenter, they'll know how to use it, but in practice, everyone I know in the trades has picked a team and just committed to it (to the tune of many thousands of dollars in tools). Fortunately for them, the tools are basically the same, just a stupid bit of plastic (and there are 3d printable or buyable adapters) so it's easy enough to switch teams if they had to, it's just a pile of money, unlike sw tools and materials where I mean, yeah, eventually I got the hang of Ruby, as I did C++ and C and Python and Perl and now typescript and JavaScript oh god and also Swift. (Managed to avoid Obj-C tho!)

> I was daunted by making the jump to C, then c++ and python. Only over time did I overcome the nerves and move on with Java, [...]

It sounds as if you did skip C++ and moved to Java instead. If so you serendipedously avoided the one language that's likely to cause problems. C++ doesn't work like the rest of the languages on your list, and it really is as full of land mines as people say - even though, with a good process, evidently it can be managed.

> certainly not specific to tooling ("I'm a DeWalt carpenter!")

I think you have it totally backwards for >90% of people, and I counter your argument with a very famous quote:

"Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a bricklayer!"