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The vast majority of commercially significant apps are built in relatively baroque and ugly languages like Java and C++.

I'm fairly certain there is vastly more code written in either FORTRAN or COBOL than Java and C++ combined. So I guess that makes FORTRAN and COBOL better than Java and C++ put together . . . ?

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That's an interesting assertion. I can't readily find estimates about the number of lines of code in different languages. Nor could I find an estimate as to the number of programmers in the world over time, from which I hoped to make an extrapolation. Somebody could write and interesting report about this. Maybe my research wasn't deep enough. Anyway, how do you figure there's more FORTRAN and COBOL?

No. It means that language choice is less important than we like to think it is.

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