It's mostly true. But it also means programming languages attract certain kinds of programmers, a language that fits their individual differences. The reason I moved to Lisp is simple. I was tired of syntax. I was tired of the language straight jacket. I'm always surprised that these things never bother other programmers. It surprises me even more that programmers tediously compare the features of their language when any non-trivial program means a large API (that is a language on top of another language). Once you realize that, who really cares about language features? What you want is something malleable. You want something that can program the program. You want (as has been said elsewhere) a language for growing languages. Instead of wasting time learning about each language's arcane meta programming facilities- learn how to write macros, and you can have all the meta programming facilities you'll ever need. But this doesn't seem to interest most programmers, I guess that's part of the individual difference thing.
