I’ve recently discovered the article “Why I Hate Advocacy” by Mark-Jason Dominus. The article is hosted at Perl.com, but it’s really just about language advocacy in general.
Considering that the guy is obviously a Perl guru, he’s remarkably objective to languages in general — he appears to be a strong believer in the “use the best tool for the job” approach.
You can be ‘unfair’ to a person, and you can hurt their [sic] feelings, even if you tell only the truth. But Pascal is a programming language, not a person. It has no feelings to hurt. Criticizing Pascal’s type system is like complaining that your hammer has a scratched face. There is no use getting upset about it. You just have to get a new hammer or make do. Saying that the criticism is unfair to the hammer, for whatever reason, is just silly. [...]