I went from Perl to Python and back again over the span of about ten years (with lots of other languages before and in between). I like them both, but Perl is also more comfortable for me. Ruby maybe even moreso, but I've never done any large projects in Ruby, so I can't say for sure. But I do know that when I write a few lines of Perl, even after ten years, I tend to include a few syntax errors...when I was learning Ruby I was often stunned by how many lines of code I could write between syntax errors. It's probably an order of magnitude higher, and something I've never experienced before. Python, I found to have roughly parity with Perl, which many Pythonistas find shocking. But I agree that there are different types of folks, though I don't know that one can do the comparison with C and C++...maybe C and Java.