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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

#81

Post by guenthert »

stackghost wrote: post #65
Geof25 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often hear about lisp but never actually figured out what tooling you need Is it interpreted or compiled language? Why should I use it instead of any other languages?

"Lisp" refers to several different languages in the same family, which contributes to the confusion. Perhaps the default choice is Common Lisp which itself is specified in an ANSI standard and has several competing implementations. Some are compiled, some are interpreted. Arguably the best is SBCL, which has a mature compiler and garbage collection. If you lean on implementation-specific features you can produce extr…

> The killer feature used to be the REPL.

The killer (hah!) feature is arguably its homoiconicity, allowing to modify the language easily within itself ("macros"). This has the obvious advantage that you can add missing features (usually) easily yourself; and exactly that causes headaches for those tasked with maintaining other people's code.

> Nowadays with LLMs writing all the code

Oh, you came all the way from the future and that's what you bring us?

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

#82

Post by oblio »

Jtsummers wrote: post #40
armchairhacker wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe JavaScript's was running in the web where Java could not (iPhones) or was considered too heavyweight (no startup). Then it became the true extremely portable language, because developers wanted a single language to write webapps in, and it was easier to get JavaScript running on their server than a new language running on every browser.

Javascript didn't need a plugin, unlike Java, and could directly alter the page contents. One of the first heavy uses was Google Maps, interactive JS-based applications took off at that point. Then with an army of web developers (meaning in browser), Node took off when it handed them a way to work on the backend in the same language. The iPhone came out after JS heavy pages came into existence, and might have acceler…

Gmail was the original AJAX woah! JavaScript application.

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

#83

Post by oblio »

chpatrick wrote: post #56
mojuba wrote: post #17

Yes to all that but still, my pet theory is that languages rise on one or two "killer features" that move the entire industry forward, and not the overall cuteness or lovability. I can suggest a list of one killer feature per each popular language, i.e. things that these languages were the first to introduce and influence many successors: C: extreme conciseness C++: implicit destructors / RAII Python: removed curly b…

JS despite its (many) faults still allowed a fairly functional style way before that was mainstream. Java and C++ only got lambdas decades later.

Let's be real here. JavaScript didn't take off because it was functional in the functional programming sense. It took off because it was built in and procedural. You didn't need to muck around with objects if you were a total noob. You'd just write your functions and call them with strings as parameters.

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

#84

Post by nyeah »

>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

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

#85

Post by pjmlp »

stackghost wrote: post #65
Geof25 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often hear about lisp but never actually figured out what tooling you need Is it interpreted or compiled language? Why should I use it instead of any other languages?

"Lisp" refers to several different languages in the same family, which contributes to the confusion. Perhaps the default choice is Common Lisp which itself is specified in an ANSI standard and has several competing implementations. Some are compiled, some are interpreted. Arguably the best is SBCL, which has a mature compiler and garbage collection. If you lean on implementation-specific features you can produce extr…

The best is kind of debatable as it lacks the IDE tooling from LispWorks and Allegro.

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

#86

Post by pjmlp »

Jtsummers wrote: post #55
mojuba wrote: post #17

Yes to all that but still, my pet theory is that languages rise on one or two "killer features" that move the entire industry forward, and not the overall cuteness or lovability. I can suggest a list of one killer feature per each popular language, i.e. things that these languages were the first to introduce and influence many successors: C: extreme conciseness C++: implicit destructors / RAII Python: removed curly b…

C came with an OS. C++ came with compatibility with C and at the peak or near peak of OO hype. Javascript came with the browser making it probably the most widely available language platform. Swift came with Objective-C compatibility, an OS, and money (iOS app store customers spend more on apps than their Android counterparts). Coming with a platform that is widely available or compatibility with an existing language…

Java came with Applets/Web, VB and Delphi with Windows, TP with cheap compilers for PC on top of Pascal university adoption,....

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

#87

Post by inigyou »

CodesInChaos wrote: post #74
jillesvangurp wrote: post #19

There's more to a language than the syntax. The libraries, tools, and the ecosystem of developers, documentation, support, etc. are much more important. There are quite a few academic languages that are interesting to people that never really gain much traction because the people behind them just never commit to proper ecosystem building. Switching languages is a big time commitment. Or at least it used to be. I find…

Even if you only consider the language itself, semantics, especially the type system, are more important than syntax.

Arguable. Both are really important. We all know the most run-down-looking restaurants have the best food, but we still go to the ones that look clean and tidy anyway.

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

#88

Post by nylonstrung »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #19

There's more to a language than the syntax. The libraries, tools, and the ecosystem of developers, documentation, support, etc. are much more important. There are quite a few academic languages that are interesting to people that never really gain much traction because the people behind them just never commit to proper ecosystem building. Switching languages is a big time commitment. Or at least it used to be. I find…

I'd argue Rust is one of the most "unfun" languages in terms of syntax but it's offset by the crates ecosystem and cargo toolchain being easily the most pleasant within systems programming

No matter if C or C++ was more "fun", CMake is not and I think the the "fun" parts of coding are worse with Rust but the particularly unpleasant ones are relatively good. In that sense Rust's success might be due to it being more or a "pain pill" than a "vitamin"

Michael Hashimoto has made comments to the effect that Zig is attractive to him relative to Rust simply because it's more enjoyable to write but I think there's very few people for whom that could outweigh the lack of ecosystem

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

#89

Post by nylonstrung »

Zak wrote: post #20

I was hoping it would address Lisp. Lisp is fun. The interactivity and instant turnaround of a Lisp REPL is still rarely matched in other languages. Common Lisp also solved a significant issue other languages didn't address well until much later: the ability to write high-level code that was fast on cheap hardware around the turn of the millennium. Lisp didn't get popular around the turn of the millennium. Success st…

Personally I think expressivity and type system power are what make a language "fun". If languages were video games, the Lisp family and Lean4 feel much more like an open-world game with many ways to play it like Factorio or Minecraft.

At the other end, Go would perhaps be the equivalent of an on-rails shooter.

And it honestly makes me disagree with the thesis here because "boring" unexpressive languages have arguably outperformed in terms of adoption for loadbearing software

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

#90

Post by nylonstrung »

stackghost wrote: post #62
Zak wrote: post #20

I was hoping it would address Lisp. Lisp is fun. The interactivity and instant turnaround of a Lisp REPL is still rarely matched in other languages. Common Lisp also solved a significant issue other languages didn't address well until much later: the ability to write high-level code that was fast on cheap hardware around the turn of the millennium. Lisp didn't get popular around the turn of the millennium. Success st…

I really enjoy writing lisp but the ecosystem of libraries is a barren wasteland. Try to find a TLS library for Common Lisp that doesn't rely on openssl, for example. Last time I looked the most mature library was marked 'experimental'.

This is the double edged sword of particularly extensible customizable languages is that they invariably won't produce a robust ecosystem of packages that can compose with each other in the manner of pip/npm/crates
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