<i>The Blub idea also ignores the fact people can accomplish great things with poor tools. Choosing a minimal tool does not necessarily say anything about you as a developer.</i><p>In fact, I think the original essay makes quite some unwarranted assumptions:<p><i>But if you work for a startup that doesn&#x27;t have pointy-haired bosses yet, you can, like we did, turn the Blub paradox to your advantage: you can use technology that your competitors, glued immovably to the median language, will never be able to match.</i><p>The median language will probably have a very good ecosystem that allows a small team of developers to quickly leverage. (Of course, someone who is not stuck in a Blub language has the same opportunity.) I think that there are very many counter-examples to the &#x27;blub paradox&#x27;. Facebook was written in PHP, Paypal was written in Java, Dropbox was written in Python (which was a Blub language by 2007).<p><i>Graham&#x27;s observation that &quot;[languages] dictate the way [developers] think about programs&quot; is the more important lesson to draw from his essay, though it&#x27;s not exactly a new idea.</i><p>Indeed, this is a very important lesson, but not foreign to anyone who learnt LISP in the 70ies or Prolog in the 80ies ;).