"What Is Code?", by Paul Ford

One of my favorite long-reads last year was “What Is Code?” by Paul Ford (emphasis added):

Your diligent decentralized team frequently writes new code that runs on the servers. So here’s a problem: What’s the best way to get that code onto those 50 computers? Click and drag with your mouse? God, no. What are you, an animal?

And that’s why everyone gets excited about GitHub. You should go to GitHub, you really should.

How Do You Pick a Programming Language? […] These are different problems. What do we need to do, how many times do we need to do it, and what existing code can we use to help us do it that many times? Ask those questions.

This is why the choice [of a programming language] is so hard. Everything can do everything, and people will tell you that you should use everything to do everything.