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Not only all that you mentioned, but picking a language isn't like it was 25 years ago. Some hypothetical "best language in the world" is irrelevant without th

Not only all that you mentioned, but picking a language isn't like it was 25 years ago. Some hypothetical "best language in the world" is irrelevant without the tooling and ecosystem around it. "BLITW" still sucks if might as well write the code in Notepad because the editor/IDE integration sucks. "BLITW" sucks if the community consists of 8 people on github. I hear of Crystal a couple/3 years ago, and it sounds neat on paper - a statically-typed, fast Ruby. Cool, but it's completely meaningless to me because it doesn't fit into any ecosystem that me or most developers care about.

p1necone 8y ago
Absolutely, as an anecdote: I keep coming back to Java for non-trivial projects not because of the language itself at all, but because of Maven Central, Gradle and the rest of the very mature CI ecosystem with Java.
ben0x539 8y ago
In practical terms, you're right, of course, but also... > "BLITW" still sucks if might as well write the code in Notepad because the editor/IDE integration sucks. We have better editors than notepad that work with any language, and there's plenty of people getting work done with fairly barebones editor setups making no use of language integration at all. > "BLITW" sucks if the community consists of 8 people on github. While adoption and library availability are clearly huge factors, they're not necessarily absolute requirements. There are plenty of good (and surely also many bad) reasons why many real-world codebases are practically isolated from the wider community despite being written in a widely adopted language. If some language was clearly the best in the world, or even just demonstrably superior in a way that is meaningful to whatever your requirements are, it can be a totally reasonable decision to choose that language for your project even though you won't be able to reach to github for a lot of conveniences, you'll have to write code in stock vim and you'll have to invest some extra time to get new contributors up to speed. I don't know if Crystal is that language, I'm not even in a great hurry to try it to find out, but I feel like if I waited until a language had reached Go levels of mindshare before taking it seriously I'd probably be missing out.

p1necone 8y ago

Absolutely, as an anecdote: I keep coming back to Java for non-trivial projects not because of the language itself at all, but because of Maven Central, Gradle and the rest of the very mature CI ecosystem with Java.

ben0x539 8y ago

In practical terms, you're right, of course, but also... > "BLITW" still sucks if might as well write the code in Notepad because the editor/IDE integration sucks. We have better editors than notepad that work with any language, and there's plenty of people getting work done with fairly barebones editor setups making no use of language integration at all. > "BLITW" sucks if the community consists of 8 people on github. While adoption and library availability are clearly huge factors, they're not necessarily absolute requirements. There are plenty of good (and surely also many bad) reasons why many real-world codebases are practically isolated from the wider community despite being written in a widely adopted language. If some language was clearly the best in the world, or even just demonstrably superior in a way that is meaningful to whatever your requirements are, it can be a totally reasonable decision to choose that language for your project even though you won't be able to reach to github for a lot of conveniences, you'll have to write code in stock vim and you'll have to invest some extra time to get new contributors up to speed. I don't know if Crystal is that language, I'm not even in a great hurry to try it to find out, but I feel like if I waited until a language had reached Go levels of mindshare before taking it seriously I'd probably be missing out.