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Academics simply don't have the time to learn languages that do not have substantial ecosystems and relative ease-of-use.

• scythe 7y ago
  It’s true - there have been attempts to fix it, but nobody has created something other people want to use. The Torch project largely replaced all of the then-popular Lua packages — wxLua was dropped for Torch’s internal qtLua, the Lua concurrency libraries (Lanes and luaproc) were ignored in favor of zeroMQ, LPeg and Lua patterns were generally less popular than PCRE and Re2 bindings, et cetera. Maybe Torch is to blame (NIH syndrome), maybe the Lua packages weren’t up to the task, maybe communication within the community is too hard (Lua lacks centralized discussion channels where experienced users are regularly active), but in the end, Lua didn’t come away looking good here. Learning a new language wasn’t too hard when that language was Python, after all.
  • cfusting 7y ago
    We'd all be happier writing math; writing code is just a nuisance.
    • uoaei 7y ago
      The Julia programming language's development started explicitly to address this sentiment.