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I love reading these ideas, similar in "otherwordliness" to Rich Hickey's, but the silent majority goes against them. Giving every programmer the ability to cre

I love reading these ideas, similar in "otherwordliness" to Rich Hickey's, but the silent majority goes against them. Giving every programmer the ability to create a language of their own does not work out well. (similarly, on Rich's ideas, having library authors forever support old implementations to avoid breaking clients does not work out in reality) The truth seems to be closer to having to endure the constant pain of rewrites and reimplementions, imperfect abstractions and systems, that slowly etch us towards some shitty golden medium, something everyone hates but everyone agrees is the best we could come up with so far. The next iteration of that is most likely not gonna come from something completely different, genius, but from something just slightly different, slightly better.

didibus 7y ago
Rich's idea is not to forever support old implementation's, but to never mutate an existing one in a breaking way. In the Clojure community, that's actually been working pretty well, and you seldom have to deal with the kind of rewrites other languages forces upon you.
sigstoat 7y ago
> Giving every programmer the ability to create a language of their own does not work out well. they've already got that ability. it just results in languages which can't interoperate. and it takes them a lot of effort to get a garbage result. i suppose that "[it] does not work out well" is a reasonable description of the current situation. maybe you're actually arguing _for_ racket!