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I know most people won't like this answer but the reason why rust is more popular now is because it had klabnik-san, mozilla, cargo and the super excited commun

I know most people won't like this answer but the reason why rust is more popular now is because it had klabnik-san, mozilla, cargo and the super excited community. The same goes for go-lang. It throws away years of research into programming languages. While rust is a great language and deserve the popularity, do you think go would have peaked in popularity if there weren't rob-pike-san and google behind it. It's not a matter of features for programming languages popularity. It's who is backing them and doing the work to unite the community. Programming communities also need to be aggressively cultish to take off in the beginning. You must be able to bite everyone's same repeated rehashed argument about lacking ecosystem, bad tooling and so on. You must be able to survive that and still shill the language. It's reality. Everyone will tell you I don't care about your language when I can use my favourite language. People have invested more money than one can imagine into fixing php, js etc. You can't easily get someone to switch from their single threaded language when they can scale it through AWS lambdas or other layers of abstractions. This is why you don't see wide use of ML. All those communities are passive. They write their tutorials and papers in pure html on a weird forgettable domain name. They don't tell people to use the language because they are conscious of the lacking ecosystem but how would you get a good ecosystem without someone adopting it? OSS doesn't pay enough. Tooling require money. They don't focus on marketing or sponsorship. Same applies for dlang.

jdxcode 6y ago
I'm pretty sure I agree with everything you said but I don't see it as a bad thing. PR/marketing (for lack of a better term) might be outside of a language initially but those efforts lead to things like making cargo really good—and it is. I think it's good for thought leaders to rally people around new ecosystems: excitement breeds innovation. I don't think programming languages need to move to the scientific method and double-blind testing. That said, you never outright said that it's bad. I'm inferring that from your choice of words.
dgb23 6y ago
> do you think go would have peaked in popularity if there weren't rob-pike-san and google behind it. This is dismissing the fact that Go is the way it is because of Pike, Griesemer and Thompson and their common design process. You have to go out of your way to not appreciate the inherent simplicity and readability of the language and its minimalist, orthogonal features. But I agree with you on the general sentiment, that a new language needs a lot of convincing. Rightfully so.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
Case study: awk. Brian Kernighan, who (co-)wrote the book on C, designed (with two others) another language, awk. Same organization (Bell Labs) pushing it as pushed C. C ate the world. awk... um... was available on all Unix installations, and got used for some things. Sure, there are people who rave about how great awk is. I've read them here on HN. When you've got the right kind of problem, it's a great tool. But there are very few people for whom it is their main everyday language. My point: Author/designer and organization can only take a language so far. At some point, the actual usefulness of the language determines how much it is actually used.
- yesenadam 6y ago
  So you're saying Awk isn't "actually useful" which is why it's hardly used?! It's an entirely different kind of tool to C. Or rather, C is a programming language, Awk is a tool. To "get used for some things" is what it's for. Sounds like you're talking more about what purpose things are used for than how much they're actually used. And Awk seems a failure to you because it's used for Awk-problems rather than C-problems? I don't understand your negativity. Awk was and is wildly successful.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    > So you're saying Awk isn't "actually useful" which is why it's hardly used?! I deny you the right to put words in my mouth. That is not remotely what I am saying.
    - yesenadam 6y ago
      Hi. Well, that's very dramatic language. I was asking if that's what you're saying...because that's what it seemed to me like you're saying, but it seemed strange. Isn't that just what I should've done? Then "I deny you the right to put words in my mouth."! Hopefully you don't often say that in conversation when people ask you what you meant. So, if by > C ate the world. awk... um... ... got used for some things. > the actual usefulness of the language determines how much it is actually used. you didn't mean something like > Awk isn't "actually useful" which is why it's hardly used then what did you mean? What are you saying? Because it really seems to me like that's the impression you meant to convey.

jdxcode 6y ago

I'm pretty sure I agree with everything you said but I don't see it as a bad thing. PR/marketing (for lack of a better term) might be outside of a language initially but those efforts lead to things like making cargo really good—and it is. I think it's good for thought leaders to rally people around new ecosystems: excitement breeds innovation. I don't think programming languages need to move to the scientific method and double-blind testing. That said, you never outright said that it's bad. I'm inferring that from your choice of words.

dgb23 6y ago

> do you think go would have peaked in popularity if there weren't rob-pike-san and google behind it. This is dismissing the fact that Go is the way it is because of Pike, Griesemer and Thompson and their common design process. You have to go out of your way to not appreciate the inherent simplicity and readability of the language and its minimalist, orthogonal features. But I agree with you on the general sentiment, that a new language needs a lot of convincing. Rightfully so.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

Case study: awk. Brian Kernighan, who (co-)wrote the book on C, designed (with two others) another language, awk. Same organization (Bell Labs) pushing it as pushed C. C ate the world. awk... um... was available on all Unix installations, and got used for some things. Sure, there are people who rave about how great awk is. I've read them here on HN. When you've got the right kind of problem, it's a great tool. But there are very few people for whom it is their main everyday language. My point: Author/designer and organization can only take a language so far. At some point, the actual usefulness of the language determines how much it is actually used.

yesenadam 6y ago
So you're saying Awk isn't "actually useful" which is why it's hardly used?! It's an entirely different kind of tool to C. Or rather, C is a programming language, Awk is a tool. To "get used for some things" is what it's for. Sounds like you're talking more about what purpose things are used for than how much they're actually used. And Awk seems a failure to you because it's used for Awk-problems rather than C-problems? I don't understand your negativity. Awk was and is wildly successful.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  > So you're saying Awk isn't "actually useful" which is why it's hardly used?! I deny you the right to put words in my mouth. That is not remotely what I am saying.
  - yesenadam 6y ago
    Hi. Well, that's very dramatic language. I was asking if that's what you're saying...because that's what it seemed to me like you're saying, but it seemed strange. Isn't that just what I should've done? Then "I deny you the right to put words in my mouth."! Hopefully you don't often say that in conversation when people ask you what you meant. So, if by > C ate the world. awk... um... ... got used for some things. > the actual usefulness of the language determines how much it is actually used. you didn't mean something like > Awk isn't "actually useful" which is why it's hardly used then what did you mean? What are you saying? Because it really seems to me like that's the impression you meant to convey.