6 ms·

> PG isn't God Can you prove that? Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, after all. You’re being a bit militant in your pg-atheism. Okay, in all seri

by alanh 11y ago

> PG isn't God Can you prove that? Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, after all. You’re being a bit militant in your pg-atheism. Okay, in all seriousness, you are correct. Ability to hire coders to work in a particular language is a legitimate concern to have. Still, it’s sad to see lack of usage drive, well, lack of usage – sometimes it looks to me like an unexamined assumption, or a self-fulfilling prophecy. To take it back to the land of religious arguments: it’s a bit cargo-culty.

smt88 11y ago
I agree with what you're saying, but "low popularity" is just one mark on one side of the pros/cons list. New languages can outweigh low popularity with lots of other important qualities: syntax, tooling, appropriateness for a certain purpose, abundance of libraries, etc. If the new language is easy to learn, that pretty much defeats the issue of low popularity all together! Unfortunately, a lot of new/amazing languages with great tooling are somewhat hard to learn. Again, Haskell might be a great language, but it's daunting to people who only have experience with C-like languages. Go is one of the exceptions, and I think it did that intentionally. Instead of having complex syntax, it just has lots of boilerplate. It's easier to read and easier to learn at the expense of being harder to write and harder to modify.
- klibertp 11y ago
  > New languages can outweigh low popularity with lots of other important qualities [...] abundance of libraries, etc. How? > If the new language is easy to learn, that pretty much defeats the issue of low popularity all together! If the language is easy to learn it's probably not worth learning. "Easy to learn" in most contexts and for most people means "similar" or "familiar". Of course, there are languages truly easy to learn thanks to their small surface and internal consistency (like Erlang, PicoLisp, Forth...) but they are very rarely regarded as such. > Again, Haskell might be a great language, but it's daunting to people who only have experience with C-like languages. My opinion is that it's their problem, not Haskell's. Instead of "being daunted" they should go polyglot already and stop whining.
  - smt88 11y ago
    > > New languages can outweigh low popularity with lots of other important qualities [...] abundance of libraries, etc. > How? By "new" I didn't necessarily brand new. I meant something like Rust, Go, or Julia. They're more than 3 years old and relatively fully-baked, but they're much younger than the mainstream languages. I don't know much about Julia, but in the Rust and Go communities, the early adopters are producing libraries for the not-so-early adopters. A good question would be, "Why?" I think the answers are: 1) fun, 2) because they want to get others to use the language, and 3) because their company has adopted the language in production. So it does (and has to) happen. In this whole thread, I'm not talking about the decision-making process of an early adopter. I'm talking more about someone replacing a mainstream language in a production or business environment. > "Easy to learn" in most contexts and for most people means "similar" or "familiar". I meant "easy to learn" however you want to define that. Similar/familiar is fine, as it's definitely contributing to the popularity of Rust and Go. It really does hurt some excellent languages (e.g. OCaml) that they look so alien to mainstream, working programmers. > My opinion is that it's their problem, not Haskell's That's true. A language should have whatever syntax is most effective and not make the same mistakes that past languages made. However, that's not the same thing as readability. A language can be totally different from C-family languages and still be readable. To mention OCaml again, I find it ridiculously hard to read because there are tiny, similar-looking characters that are significant all over the place. To my eye, significant dots and tildes are very hard to pick out when I'm scanning down a page. So assuming Haskell is readable to a complete newbie, it isn't Haskell's problem that the syntax is new. But it is Haskell's problem if it can't overcome the catch-22 that people don't use a language if other people don't use it. I'm glad we're talking about Haskell, because that community is very enthusiastic and has made some incredible, accessible Haskell resources to solve this problem. It may not be their problem, but they're still attacking it, as every language has to. It seems to me that the Rust community knows this and is going in the same direction with highly-accessible tutorials. As for Go, the language is so small that it's "easy to learn" in terms of syntax, but the patterns and paradigms you use in Go might take longer as a result.
    - klibertp 11y ago
      > It really does hurt some excellent languages (e.g. OCaml) that they look so alien to mainstream, working programmers. How will you explain a relative success of F#, then? In my opinion "looking alien" is not important at all. To the mainstream real qualities are much less important than marketing; that's true in many areas and mainstream programming is not an exception. Given enough marketing, you can turn "alien syntax" into a perceived advantage relatively easily. > To mention OCaml again, I find it ridiculously hard to read because there are tiny, similar-looking characters that are significant all over the place. Have you seen J? I'll just paste a bit of code in it: join =: 1 : 0 ((([:{.[:>{.),:[:([:<(>"0))"1[:{:[:1 2 0&|:[:>([:,u"0)#]) (pr y)) ) Is it readable? I'm told that yes, it is. There are people who can read this mess just fine, no problems at all. Readability is an artifact of familiarity and, in some cases, tooling. You can get used to reading (and writing) even the most "unreadable" of syntaxes. Ask a PERL programmer if she finds her language readable. Will she say "no"? My point is: until readability is formally defined and we're able to measure it objectively it's utterly useless to talk about it. > But it is Haskell's problem if it can't overcome the catch-22 that people don't use a language if other people don't use it. Yes, but this problem cannot be solved with technical qualities alone. Was it possible we wouldn't use C, Java or JavaScript at all. It's marketing and "killer use-cases" that matter. You want to use the same language your OS is written in, for example. Was Windows written in OCaml you'd use OCaml to write Windows programs. If there's a program you really like, which is scriptable in Lua, you will use Lua.

by alanh 11y ago

smt88 11y ago

I agree with what you're saying, but "low popularity" is just one mark on one side of the pros/cons list. New languages can outweigh low popularity with lots of other important qualities: syntax, tooling, appropriateness for a certain purpose, abundance of libraries, etc. If the new language is easy to learn, that pretty much defeats the issue of low popularity all together! Unfortunately, a lot of new/amazing languages with great tooling are somewhat hard to learn. Again, Haskell might be a great language, but it's daunting to people who only have experience with C-like languages. Go is one of the exceptions, and I think it did that intentionally. Instead of having complex syntax, it just has lots of boilerplate. It's easier to read and easier to learn at the expense of being harder to write and harder to modify.

klibertp 11y ago
> New languages can outweigh low popularity with lots of other important qualities [...] abundance of libraries, etc. How? > If the new language is easy to learn, that pretty much defeats the issue of low popularity all together! If the language is easy to learn it's probably not worth learning. "Easy to learn" in most contexts and for most people means "similar" or "familiar". Of course, there are languages truly easy to learn thanks to their small surface and internal consistency (like Erlang, PicoLisp, Forth...) but they are very rarely regarded as such. > Again, Haskell might be a great language, but it's daunting to people who only have experience with C-like languages. My opinion is that it's their problem, not Haskell's. Instead of "being daunted" they should go polyglot already and stop whining.
- smt88 11y ago
  > > New languages can outweigh low popularity with lots of other important qualities [...] abundance of libraries, etc. > How? By "new" I didn't necessarily brand new. I meant something like Rust, Go, or Julia. They're more than 3 years old and relatively fully-baked, but they're much younger than the mainstream languages. I don't know much about Julia, but in the Rust and Go communities, the early adopters are producing libraries for the not-so-early adopters. A good question would be, "Why?" I think the answers are: 1) fun, 2) because they want to get others to use the language, and 3) because their company has adopted the language in production. So it does (and has to) happen. In this whole thread, I'm not talking about the decision-making process of an early adopter. I'm talking more about someone replacing a mainstream language in a production or business environment. > "Easy to learn" in most contexts and for most people means "similar" or "familiar". I meant "easy to learn" however you want to define that. Similar/familiar is fine, as it's definitely contributing to the popularity of Rust and Go. It really does hurt some excellent languages (e.g. OCaml) that they look so alien to mainstream, working programmers. > My opinion is that it's their problem, not Haskell's That's true. A language should have whatever syntax is most effective and not make the same mistakes that past languages made. However, that's not the same thing as readability. A language can be totally different from C-family languages and still be readable. To mention OCaml again, I find it ridiculously hard to read because there are tiny, similar-looking characters that are significant all over the place. To my eye, significant dots and tildes are very hard to pick out when I'm scanning down a page. So assuming Haskell is readable to a complete newbie, it isn't Haskell's problem that the syntax is new. But it is Haskell's problem if it can't overcome the catch-22 that people don't use a language if other people don't use it. I'm glad we're talking about Haskell, because that community is very enthusiastic and has made some incredible, accessible Haskell resources to solve this problem. It may not be their problem, but they're still attacking it, as every language has to. It seems to me that the Rust community knows this and is going in the same direction with highly-accessible tutorials. As for Go, the language is so small that it's "easy to learn" in terms of syntax, but the patterns and paradigms you use in Go might take longer as a result.
  - klibertp 11y ago
    > It really does hurt some excellent languages (e.g. OCaml) that they look so alien to mainstream, working programmers. How will you explain a relative success of F#, then? In my opinion "looking alien" is not important at all. To the mainstream real qualities are much less important than marketing; that's true in many areas and mainstream programming is not an exception. Given enough marketing, you can turn "alien syntax" into a perceived advantage relatively easily. > To mention OCaml again, I find it ridiculously hard to read because there are tiny, similar-looking characters that are significant all over the place. Have you seen J? I'll just paste a bit of code in it: join =: 1 : 0 ((([:{.[:>{.),:[:([:<(>"0))"1[:{:[:1 2 0&|:[:>([:,u"0)#]) (pr y)) ) Is it readable? I'm told that yes, it is. There are people who can read this mess just fine, no problems at all. Readability is an artifact of familiarity and, in some cases, tooling. You can get used to reading (and writing) even the most "unreadable" of syntaxes. Ask a PERL programmer if she finds her language readable. Will she say "no"? My point is: until readability is formally defined and we're able to measure it objectively it's utterly useless to talk about it. > But it is Haskell's problem if it can't overcome the catch-22 that people don't use a language if other people don't use it. Yes, but this problem cannot be solved with technical qualities alone. Was it possible we wouldn't use C, Java or JavaScript at all. It's marketing and "killer use-cases" that matter. You want to use the same language your OS is written in, for example. Was Windows written in OCaml you'd use OCaml to write Windows programs. If there's a program you really like, which is scriptable in Lua, you will use Lua.