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Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail

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Re: Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail

#3

Post by iroddis »

> For the person who only wants the notes, the sampler wins the job outright, completely. It will never play the wrong thing or at the wrong moment. For the person playing, it fails, because driving it costs more than playing, and it never touches the art at all.

This entire essay could be about AI adoption as well. Some programmers love to program, and while AI is great at producing the code, it doesn’t really viscerally appeal if one loves coding itself.

Re: Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail

#4

Post by jottinger »

iroddis wrote: post #3

> For the person who only wants the notes, the sampler wins the job outright, completely. It will never play the wrong thing or at the wrong moment. For the person playing, it fails, because driving it costs more than playing, and it never touches the art at all. This entire essay could be about AI adoption as well. Some programmers love to program, and while AI is great at producing the code, it doesn’t really visce…

OP here. Yeah, you're not wrong. A lot of what IS driving AI code is that the writing code part isn't the intriguing aspect: it's designing, and the code generation is the grunt work that makes the design happen. And then you find out that most humans aren't that great at design: most programmers handwave their way through specifications, and thus the AIs do what they're told, and generate utter dreck, a lot like some of the "melody generators" do - they get handed very artificial constraints about what "good melodies" sound like, so they all sound very ordinary, because they STILL lack soul and replace inspiration with algorithm.

Re: Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail

#5

Post by jdw64 »

I've also researched languages and written a similar piece[1]. Most successful languages had adoption momentum outside of the language itself. Conversely, there are many interesting failures—languages that were technically fascinating but ended up having their ideas stolen by later successful languages. A language isn't like a paper; it doesn't compete solely on the quality of its ideas [1]https://www.makonea.com/en-US/blog/programming-languages-are...

Re: Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail

#8

Post by lapcat »

It's ridiculous to call Objective-C "a false start".

1) Objective-C is 40 years old.

2) Objective-C was used to create NeXTSTEP and by extension Mac OS X and iOS.

3) Objective-C is no more "awkward" than any other programming language. I actually prefer its verbosity to Swift's terseness.

4) Although Swift did eventually become more popular, the claim about Objective-C that "the moment Swift existed, it evaporated" is not only false but a gross exaggeration.

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