When developing a piece of software concentrate on building a languge to solve problems in the domain you are working in. No one fixed language can solve every problem so build a customized language just for that domain.

There's only one catch for me. It only runs on MacOS X. I have seen a number of really innovative Macintosh applications go by in the last few months. Aquamind's Notetaker is another that comes easily to mind. I keep toying with the idea of switching back (I was a long time Macintosh user). I just can't convince myself to do it. I know that Mac developers are experiencing very high degrees of productivity with Cocoa and Smalltalk, er, Objective-C. But I can't get past the closed-source issue with Cocoa. I've watched too many great apps die: Lotus Agenda, Think Tank, More, Arrange, InControl, Ecco Professional, and more. If I'm going to switch to a new platform, I want to switch onto a predominantly open-source platform. I would be happy to pay for open source versions of Hydra or Notetaker -- I want those guys to be able to eat and do cool software. But I don't want to gamble with my data anymore. So for now, I'll live with the slow pain of watching the Mac guys do cool software that I can't run.