An interesting statement. Three points: 1/About "Spirit-like C++". You're saying that it's not doing C++ "the way it was intended". Fortunately there are people who go beyond and just "don't use things they way they were designed for". Using a stick to hunt animals? This is just crazy talk. Maybe in the end a C++/Functional language will emerge. Maybe Spirit will be stuck at some point. Maybe Joel will start a new project. Maybe Spirit will be used to program an AI that's going to enslave humanity. Or it will solve world hunger. Who knows? Let people play around with technology. I don't think it harms anyone to try new directions. Competition is good. Everybody working on the same project doesn't improve productivity or quality. Quite the contrary. 2/You overstate the importance of the language choice on the final quality of the program. Tough problems emerge in the C++ language because generally we are closer to the system. So we "see" the problems. It's also because a large part of the community is trying to improve the way we do things for more efficiency and power and people think very hard about rare but real problems. These problems exist nevertheless in the other languages. They were just solved (with more or less luck) by the language maker. Or ignored. Or avoided in a way that really don't help you. You know what's the real influence on the program? The brains working on it. 3/I am pretty sure you are free to use whatever language you fancy for your projects. Meanwhile, the galaxies of the universe will continue an approximatively identical course. (personal advice: you should play with Scheme. It's a good language to learn) In other news I've heard the latest Batman game is awesome. -- EA