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> and so improvement can only ever be small and incremental.

You seem to hint that some hypothetical non-small improvement can be made differently (in some other language). Perhaps it could, but it doesn't seem anyone has done it yet. We do not observe large differences between and in companies based on language choice. I think some of the reason is that developers overestimate the cost of coding in the entire software development process.

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> We do not observe large differences between and in companies based on language choice.

Hmm, I think it's pretty clear that most folks are far more productive in Python than say C++. But yes, I agree that there's no silver bullet, programming is hard.

Well, not at all in the domains where C++ is normally used nowadays; that's why I talked about comparing reasonable choices. On the other hand, you can see how quickly people transitioned away from C++ to more appropriate alternatives in those domains where C++ is no longer used. It happened virtually overnight (same as the transition from Assembly to Fortran and from Fortran to C). When you don't see such a rapid transition it's usually a good sign that none of the alternatives offers a big advantage.

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