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I don't know if I buy the justification for supporting multiple syntaxes. It's a slippery slope towards appeasing a million people's particular syntactic pet p

I don't know if I buy the justification for supporting multiple syntaxes. It's a slippery slope towards appeasing a million people's particular syntactic pet peeves, and it's not worth the effort of supporting them all. With the exception of s-expressions (too many parentheses) and mandatory/significant whitespace, most people don't seem to care too much about syntax, IME. Semantics are much more important.

macintux 8y ago
> most people don't seem to care too much about syntax Speaking as an Erlang enthusiast, I must disagree. I love the syntax, but most people see "different" and think "bad".
- camgunz 8y ago
  Yeah, I generally agree. But I think our understanding of like, language popularity is a little colored by "the era of language fads". C++ is probably first, then Java, PHP, Ruby, and now JavaScript. If a language doesn't build a huge mainstream base (Ruby maybe failed at this but maybe only for lack of a big corporate backer) or 100% occupy the dev zeitgeist for an extended period of time, we think it hasn't caught on. But like, Erlang powers a lot of web infrastructure. Whatsapp is most famous, but there are a lot of services I'm personally aware of that are written in Erlang, and often these were situations where a mature dev team wanted to see if Erlang solved the problems they'd experienced writing backend services in Java or Python. So yeah while syntax probably prevents you from achieving rockstar status or world domination, I think those days might be over, and I think the true measure of success is whether or not experienced dev teams are using the tech to solve real problems.