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All good points. Personally, its an idealism versus practicality argument. I personally believe (take this with a grain of salt) that we should deprecate awful

All good points. Personally, its an idealism versus practicality argument. I personally believe (take this with a grain of salt) that we should deprecate awful languages like JS if there is truly a better alternative out there that gives superior power, ease of use, and safety. The economist in me points out that this would've already happened had they really been that much better. Kind of like one-hit wonders like "ice-ice baby" are actually not crappy songs but amazing works of art according to the masses. Maybe one day P6 will get optimized and polished enough to where all users of (P5, Python, Ruby, and TCL) say "I want that" and switch. Individuals might do that. Companies are more like glaciers.

dri_ft 10y ago
I don't think whether or not it happens (or has already happened) depends solely on whether the other languages are better. Isn't it a lot of it a co-ordination problems? People want to write in the languages that are widely used and have a lot of libraries; people write libraries for languages that are already widely used; that sort of thing? You're right about Ice Ice Baby, though.
- dgreensp 10y ago
  I see it as popularity vs merit. A lot of things feed into popularity, like familiarity and network effects. Also, you can be popular by appealing to the sentiments or taste of the masses or influencers, regardless of merit, unless there are strong corrective market forces.
- throwaway7645 10y ago
  Haha, you're right that there is a chicken and egg problem, but if DART was really an order of magnitude greater than JS, there would be a lot more DART programmers after this many years.
paulddraper 10y ago
You don't need to have thousands of others appreciate Ice Ice Baby and create an ecosystem of libraries and tooling around it. But a successful language requires those things, for the masses (not the early adopters). That creates glacial inertia, even for individuals.

dri_ft 10y ago

I don't think whether or not it happens (or has already happened) depends solely on whether the other languages are better. Isn't it a lot of it a co-ordination problems? People want to write in the languages that are widely used and have a lot of libraries; people write libraries for languages that are already widely used; that sort of thing? You're right about Ice Ice Baby, though.

dgreensp 10y ago
I see it as popularity vs merit. A lot of things feed into popularity, like familiarity and network effects. Also, you can be popular by appealing to the sentiments or taste of the masses or influencers, regardless of merit, unless there are strong corrective market forces.
throwaway7645 10y ago
Haha, you're right that there is a chicken and egg problem, but if DART was really an order of magnitude greater than JS, there would be a lot more DART programmers after this many years.

paulddraper 10y ago

You don't need to have thousands of others appreciate Ice Ice Baby and create an ecosystem of libraries and tooling around it. But a successful language requires those things, for the masses (not the early adopters). That creates glacial inertia, even for individuals.