Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by ch4s3 » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 2:49 PM UTC

nylonstrung wrote: post #88

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 o…

Agreed, rust is SUPER not fun IMHO but I use it a lot via FFI for things I wouldn't do in Elixir which I prefer to write/read. The broad array of well built tools on cargo is just so hard to compete with, and cargo as a tool beats any language tooling for any language with similar breadth. The JVM has every tool imaginable but I'd rather built it myself than tangle with JVM tooling.

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

#92

Post by asa400 » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 2:50 PM UTC

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 “programmer happiness”, and while probably not as specifically a rebellion against Java, it attracted a ton of burnt out Java people who went on to found thousands of startups on Ruby. Ruby continues to be massive for web apps, Rails is still extremely popular compared to many alternatives.

Scala similarly to the previous examples was a Java-like with Haskell flavor that escaped an academic lab and accidentally took over the “big data” craze in the 2010s because they wrote Spark in it. If you were around then, Scala was truly hot at the time.

There are others of course but I found the examples in the OP a relatively surface level analysis of a space that has experienced an absolute explosion of diversity and novelty in the last 20 years.

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

#93

Post by nylonstrung » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

The problem here is that "mechanical empathy" is for most neurotypical humans at odds with fun. It's hard to say that static typing is "fun" but at this point the benefits are so abundantly obvious that it's been shoehorned into Python via Pydantic and MyPy/Ty

I'd argue as well that "fun" for a lot of programmers seemingly entails over-abstracting, inventing complicated interfaces & following Clean Code dogma etc.

I think there's an inherent tension between what's fun and what is actually good software from a purely mechanical standpoint of performance and functionality

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

#94

Post by bluGill » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

Zak wrote: post #79

red_admiral wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can write the application function by function ... and then use JUnit or TestNG in Java, or similar features in other languages. Which you can automatically run, including showing code coverage, both with a button in your IDE and as part of the CI/CD process when you commit.

Unit testing doesn't provide the level of interactivity a REPL does. A REPL lets you see the output of parts of an unfinished function based on the running program's state. If you've already thought out the whole program before you start writing it, that may not be as valuable. In my experience, software often isn't that way and the ease of exploration a REPL and long-running process provide are unmatched.

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 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.

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

#95

Post by grim_io » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 2:53 PM UTC

purplemoonx wrote: post #12

grim_io wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ridiculous. If anything, the time of the ubiquitous JS might be over when anyone can generate native UI without electron.

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.

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

#96

Post by bluGill » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 2:55 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #83

chpatrick wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Javascript took off because it was your only option for a lot of things. Flash and Java tried, but both were always hit and miss as to who could use it. Everybody had javascript in their browser so you had no choice if you were to reach them but meet them where they were.

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

#97

Post by pdimitar » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 3:01 PM UTC

internet_points wrote: post #47

Heh, the article is kind of negative about Haskell's "success", but fun is exactly the reason why I still prefer Haskell over all other languages.

What kind of workplaces you people have if you can code "for fun"?

I am tired of only ever being gauged by immediate usefulness. You hiring?

Also when you emphasize "exactly", you are not giving any actual reasons.

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

#98

Post by lifefeed » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 3:03 PM UTC

I think in terms of niches and fitness

Programming languages are under a Darwinism-like pressure of programmer's attention. They have to fit a niche, and the ones that fit the niche best, survive. What another commentator calls killed features is, to me, a way to fit a niche.

Sometimes that niche is fun, like Python. Javascript's niche is that it's literally the only option. I suspect some languages (Java) fill a niche because they've been there for so long there's no oxygen for anything else to have a chance.

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

#99

Post by stackghost » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 3:06 PM UTC

guenthert wrote: post #81

stackghost wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I never said I liked the future, but it is what it is.

If you're building products without LLMs today you're going to get outcompeted by people who do, and can iterate faster. I have written a fair bit of lisp and when it isn't refusing to fix security bugs because openai are cowards, 5.6-Sol can do in hours what would take me days.

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

#100

Post by lyu07282 » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 3:07 PM UTC

jdw64 wrote: post #5

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…

I wouldn't call it stealing ideas, all languages build on ideas from older languages. language design is more akin to a academic discipline building on top of each other, languages have lineages like a family tree. Language users have usually no idea about the ancestry of the language they are using. Like Ruby borrowed heavily from Smalltalk, nobody is arguing Ruby stole from it.

But I agree the adoption is the key factor, more people using a language grows the ecosystem and it becomes self perpetuating from there. This is why I disagree with the article, I don't think python is a good language but I still wrote hundreds of thousands of lines in it over the last decade, not because it's fun but because of its strong ecosystem fitting the task at hand.