I don't think things have to be mutually-exclusive. The article suggests that you have to be in either the language camp or tools camp because of the time-inves

I don't think things have to be mutually-exclusive. The article suggests that you have to be in either the language camp or tools camp because of the time-investment developers have to make in either - but in reality the investment is smaller than portrayed IMO. As for parallel programming - that itself is a wide-spectrum of different types of programming, and again I don't think we have to paint it as choosing one or the other. For example, when I worked on parallel algorithms for very large clusters, I was really missing some of the things IDEs provide like graphical debuggers. While a better-designed language may have made some parts of my task easier, it would also have made low-level optimization much harder. tl;dr - different things needed for different situations