Programming languages and their ecosystems

There was an article called “Ruby is defined by terrible tools”. I haven’t enough Ruby experience to know whether its thesis is true, but one quote really stuck out for me:

Programming languages cannot be considered separately from their ecosystems.

I totally agree with this, almost to the point where the language itself is secondary to the tools. “Softer” things can go a long way to making a language good to work with: package management; documentation; tooling; community.

Personally, I feel this way about Node. I don’t find JavaScript a pleasure to work with, but the Node ecosystem is solid.