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> New languages can outweigh low popularity with lots of other important qualities [...] abundance of libraries, etc. How? > If the new language is easy to le

• 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.
    • smt88 11y ago
      > My point is: until readability is formally defined and we're able to measure it objectively it's utterly useless to talk about it. It's more defined than we, as programmers, pretend it is. There's research in cognitive psychology, linguistics, and lexicology that tells us that some things are easier for human brains to process than others. For example, if you skim through a block of code, it's easier to pick out "&&" than it is to pick out "and". There are lots of rules like this. This is partially because of the way humans read words. If yuo spel a bunhc of words wrng in a sentence in minor ways that don't alter the shapes too much, it's still very readable. That's why your example of J is very hard to read (objectively, not relatively). If someone removed or altered a few of those symbols, no one would notice upon skimming it. It's ludicrous to argue that it's readable just because some people say it is (and I think they're just bragging to begin with).