I explicitly talked about minor syntactic differences between curly-brace languages, not about Lisp or Smaltalk. Switching from one curly-brace language to another generally doesn't involve any deep paradigm shift, it's essentially just memorizing a bunch of irrelevant syntax differences. If I have some procedural C style functionality implemented the same way in languages X and Y (happens pretty often), having the code 95% identical is missing out on the nice things that I could have if the code were 100% identical.
It's true that the Java runtime and the C# runtime provide different services. But the same is true for databases. Oracle's feature set is different from PostgreSQL's. Yet the database community got its act together enough to standardize the syntax for basic features at least, so you don't have to relearn inner joins when you switch, and you can mention "SQL" in job openings and be understood. (I wonder if the NoSQL community ever gets smart enough to do the same?)
It's true that the Java runtime and the C# runtime provide different services. But the same is true for databases. Oracle's feature set is different from PostgreSQL's. Yet the database community got its act together enough to standardize the syntax for basic features at least, so you don't have to relearn inner joins when you switch, and you can mention "SQL" in job openings and be understood. (I wonder if the NoSQL community ever gets smart enough to do the same?)