It’s funny to me how languages slowly morph into the same thing. Perl 6 steals piles of Ruby features, and Ruby is totally derivative of Perl. I was looking at my roommate’s VB book last night and it had a preview of VB.NET. It began with, “one of the changes in vb.net is that it’s now statically typed”. Is that even the same language? They gutted it to make it work with .NET.
I had a great experience in a programming languages class where the TA publicly and thoroughly scolded me for confusing the syntax of a language with its semantics. Syntax is important, but it’s not really the essence of the language.