As you said in another post there is some "to each their own" in it, but I don't disagree with what you wrote. If I started a new major project, it's a coin flip whether I would choose Ruby today (Rails is a separate sub-conversation). However, what I would choose instead doesn't feel obvious either. I know "it depends" is a cliche, but it is so for a reason.

I half-agree with this sentiment and want to stream-of-thoughts back at you in response:

>I don't find there to be huge differences in legibility between the common high level languages. This is especially true now that I'm reading far more than I'm writing, and relying on static analyses to determine correctness, far more than on my own interpretation of the code.

At best I have 70% confidence in what I'm about to say. Without AI agents, I feel like a language and ecosystem's expressivity could shine more when a project had heavy and finicky business logic. It matters less when you can ask your bot to interpret the invariants and feature behaviors at a broad scale. Again, I'm not 100% confident in that claim.

Even prior to AI agents, in such a project, first and foremost you needed to understand why the piece of functionality you're looking at does what it does within the business domain. The code was already secondary, but I think what agents have changed (for me) is that by lowering the cost of maintaining types, tests, and documentation, the code (and thus its expressiveness) might be becoming tertiary? Even when I was the one who wrote some documentation, half of the time I would go straight to the code to get an answer, rather than read my past explanations. Perhaps a sign that I am a bad doc writer? But that's where I felt the combined language-ecosystem expressiveness mattered most (along with keeping to architectural standards): I need to look back at something to understand it.

To try and end with a conclusion for my own thinking aloud: I feel like further emphasizing those three aspects (types, tests, documentation) flattens the demands on "legibility". Bouncing between tests (and even types) in Language X vs Language Y is far less differentiated than bouncing between Language X's ORMs vs Language Y's ORMs (or dataframe libs, or http servers, et cetera).