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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

#111

Post by jottinger »

stackghost wrote: post #101
bluGill wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes and no. You are correct the REPL provides more interactivity. However the downside is you can break something that used to work while make something else work. There is no reason you can have a REPL and unit tests in the same. Every change results in running all the tests. (of course most changes are syntax error - just "if foo()" is 7 syntax errors. ) I've seen various attempts of this over the years, but quickl…

>I've seen various attempts of this over the years, but quickly your code becomes more complex than the computer can run while you type and you fall back to running most of the tests after in some way. That does not match my experience with lisp.

Mine, either.

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

#112

Post by giancarlostoro »

purplemoonx wrote: post #46
giancarlostoro wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still attribute a rich OOTB standard library for Go’s success. You have an OOTB production capable web HTTP server baked into the standard library since practically day 1?

Have you never heard of Node.js where they got the idea from

They were made roughly around the same time to be fair, but Go's standard library was richer at the time I thought? Even so, JavaScript hate it or love it (I both hate and love it) is massive by virtue of being the primary scripting language for front-end web. I am fully aware of its backend capabilities, but Go gave us: C-like syntax, natively compiled, and a rich OOTB standard library that Google uses in production. Even YouTube adopted Go early on and made Vitess which was a "middle-man" for MySQL which helped YouTube with their back-end starting in 2010, it would help with query routing and sharding, connection pooling, query safety and even optimizing queries before they got to MySQL, as well as row-level caching.

Honestly I'm not trying to downplay Node, I respect Node for what it was and is, but Go punched above its weight early on too.

I think the industry was starved for a back-end language that was simple, compiled natively (removing a lot of environmental setup overhead) and was production ready out of the box.

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

#113

Post by purplemoonx »

grim_io wrote: post #95
purplemoonx wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has been trivial to do for 10+ years. Next you’re gonna say I need RN or Expo to write JS for iOS. JS ecosystem = capitalism, websites, payments Python = math, language, theory

How did all of the capitalism get to be JavaScript? Let's keep ourselves a bit grounded. No, payments certainly don't run on JavaScript, unless all you know about payment systems are the web frontends.

If you knew anything about payment systems, you'd know you get a nonce or receiptID and it is a front-end only thing. You don't do the backend banking yourself.

Maybe your backend sends an email, or saves the receipt, but that's peripheral.

The entire Payments flow is front-end capture, then the service doing all the actual backend payment part. It's a black box from your end and you can decide to do it entirely front-end if you wanted. There's no way around it.

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

#114

Post by jottinger »

asa400 wrote: post #92

Unfortunate how many languages with interesting stories were either glossed over or omitted entirely. Clojure was an outright revolution against Java’s boring clumsiness, and many businesses are quietly making money with it today. Hickey even _explicitly_ comments on expertise (the OPs discussion about Rust and C++ being worth it) in the context of learning to play the violin. Ruby declared itself as being all about…

Totally fair, but as I mentioned elsewhere, I left a lot of languages out in my consideration even when they're on my CV. Heck, I work in Java in my day job - I'm taking time away from it to write this comment - and realized after I'd finished my third draft that I didn't mention it at all. And I DO Clojure, have done Ruby, have done Scala (and will never do so again if I have any choice in the matter).

I could have gone into each language as a sort of postmortem - even for the ones that aren't dead right now - but for every one of them there'd be a host of people saying "wait, you're wrong" and they'd be right, and maybe I would be in that host saying I was wrong at the same time. (Again, see the footnotes: it's right there!)

But the piece isn't abotu a postmortem analysis of whether a language is fun or not - what I enjoy isn't going to be what you enjoy, nor should it be, and I don't care what you use, as long as you use it well and for the benefit of mankind.

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

#115

Post by oblio »

WalterSlovotsky wrote: post #108
oblio wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail was the original AJAX woah! JavaScript application.

Somewhat ironic, since AJAX was originally created by Microsoft to implement the Outlook web client.

Microsoft was early and late to lots of things. They dominated early smartphones, too.

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

#116

Post by jottinger »

nyeah wrote: post #84

>That quote is the article, and it's a little surprising that it's buried so far into the content Is it really surprising in 2026? Today's online writing style is not primarily designed to communicate. It's designed to keep the reader 'engaged' for as long as possible. The reader's time is a resource to be extracted. I'm absolutely not poking this author individually. It's the writing style of the net

Yeah, and I despise it. :D I purposefully expose the lede in my own articles early and often and as up front as I can make it - the editorial reviews keep saying "you should optimize for the clix, maing!" and ... no. If someone doesn't want to read the crap I come up with, I want them to know they don't want to read it right out of the gate, personally.

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

#117

Post by purplemoonx »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #112
purplemoonx wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you never heard of Node.js where they got the idea from

They were made roughly around the same time to be fair, but Go's standard library was richer at the time I thought? Even so, JavaScript hate it or love it (I both hate and love it) is massive by virtue of being the primary scripting language for front-end web. I am fully aware of its backend capabilities, but Go gave us: C-like syntax, natively compiled, and a rich OOTB standard library that Google uses in production…

Node.js came way before Go. If you fact-check with AI, it will say "Go was invented in 2009" but anyone who has been around knows it's more like ~2013.

Node.js was 90% of the inspiration for Go to exist in the first place.

Swift also would have never came about if it wasn't for people doing iOS way better in JavaScript.

SwiftUI is basically React conceptually

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

#118

Post by jottinger »

aworks wrote: post #21

I'm retired now but it never occurred to me the vocational languages I enjoyed most were all respectable or false starts (or obscure): FORTRAN, Pascal, Icon, Ada, Tcl. And in hindsight, I only grudgingly accepted the immortals, although I recognized at the time they would be widely adopted: C, C++, Java, Javascript, and Python. Is awk still respectable? Is it even a programming language?

All of them are respectable. I've done most of those - Icon's new for me, and I don't think I've ever written anything in Ada either although I've come unfortunately close thanks to industrial requirements. I escaped!

And yes, awk is a programming language. And respectable. I tend not to use it much any more, but that's because there are other things that feel easier than remembering the syntax. C'est la vie.

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

#119

Post by giancarlostoro »

purplemoonx wrote: post #117
giancarlostoro wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were made roughly around the same time to be fair, but Go's standard library was richer at the time I thought? Even so, JavaScript hate it or love it (I both hate and love it) is massive by virtue of being the primary scripting language for front-end web. I am fully aware of its backend capabilities, but Go gave us: C-like syntax, natively compiled, and a rich OOTB standard library that Google uses in production…

Node.js came way before Go. If you fact-check with AI, it will say "Go was invented in 2009" but anyone who has been around knows it's more like ~2013. Node.js was 90% of the inspiration for Go to exist in the first place. Swift also would have never came about if it wasn't for people doing iOS way better in JavaScript. SwiftUI is basically React conceptually

Technically 2007, but Go 1.0 was in 2009 when the Windows compiler was finally released, Go from 2007 till 2009 was Linux / Unix first. I don't recall when Mac came, but I would not be surprised if very quickly given that GCC worked just fine on Mac at the time.

The Go community made Go work on Windows leading up to 2009, the core maintainers of Go did not make the Windows build themselves, they didn't care about Windows being a target. I say this to emphasize how quickly popular it became that it built up a community that wanted it to build for Windows, and they did.

2013 is when the rest of the world was starting to catch on to Go I suppose, Docker came out in 2013, but I distinctly remember learning Go on Windows in 2009 and building web apps, without any third party packages.

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

#120

Post by hnlmorg »

jottinger wrote: post #57
hnlmorg wrote: post #25

I tried to read this with an open mind but the premise of the article is so reductive I gave up quickly. There’s a whole plethora of reasons a language might fall in or out of favour. From ecosystem lock in (eg Objective-C was mandatory for Apple development prior to swift and Visual Basic was ostensibly killed by Microsoft during the dot net upsell) to fragmentation in the community (eg Perl vs Raku). These don’t me…

Also, since I tend to loop back: yes, "fun" is subjective, and your points about Objective C and Pascal were actually mentioned directly in the footnotes, including the "false start" nomenclature, which came from Oram, not me, and I mentioned COBOL's specific remaining survival directly as well. Comments are always appreciated, of course, but they're best when they actually address the article they're commenting on i…

Maybe you shouldn’t open with such provocative statements if you are already aware they’re not fair?

Posting flamebate and expecting people to read until the footnotes isn’t going to get you favourable feedback.

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