I think a project along the lines of Todo MVC for general programming languages - https://github.com/addyosmani/todomvc/ - would work really well for illustrating these kind of debates.
Ideally it'd be a reasonably involved problem domain (rather than a todo list) with persistance, networking and something which requires parallelism/concurrency (I'm sure there are other categories too). This'd expose each language to the types of complexity that exposes the really interesting differences - does language X allow a clean API even when we require immutability for parallelism, does language Y impose boiler plate on simple problems, Z require unreadable line noise?
I find these debates nearly useless without evidence and code to read.
Ideally it'd be a reasonably involved problem domain (rather than a todo list) with persistance, networking and something which requires parallelism/concurrency (I'm sure there are other categories too). This'd expose each language to the types of complexity that exposes the really interesting differences - does language X allow a clean API even when we require immutability for parallelism, does language Y impose boiler plate on simple problems, Z require unreadable line noise?
I find these debates nearly useless without evidence and code to read.