Kevin Kelleher suggested an interesting way to compare programming languages: to describe each in terms of the problem it fixes. The surprising thing is how many, and how well, languages can be described this way.

Some of my favorites

Fortran: Assembly language is too low-level.

Cobol: Fortran is scary.

Basic: Fortran is scary.

C: Assemby language is too low-level.

C++: C is too low-level.

Java: C++ is a kludge. And Microsoft is going to crush us.

C#: Java is controlled by Sun.

Perl: Shell scripts/awk/sed are not enough like programming languages.

Python: Perl is a kludge.

Paul Graham: What Languages Fix