>Unpopular opinion: I never understood this drive to save or revitalize dying languages. I'm frankly astonished to see this on HN of all places, where I'd kind

>Unpopular opinion: I never understood this drive to save or revitalize dying languages. I'm frankly astonished to see this on HN of all places, where I'd kind of assume everyone who's been around here a year or two has at least heard of "programming languages" and the fact that even 'failed' languages have frequently had extensive lessons and valuable tidbits for others. All languages humans use exhibit strong path dependency and network effects. We don't necessarily speak them because they're general optima, but rather it's heavily a matter of what others speak and the history leading up to this point. Certain groups of people who happened to speak certain languages happened to be extremely successful at key times, and here we are. But language shapes thinking to some extent and tends to bake in a certain amount of existing societal thinking, relationships, and thus practices of how to be social beings and make things work. They represent part of fruits of independent real world experiments in culture amounting to hundreds of thousands to billions of man years. That's not something to throw away so lightly. To the extent that we aren't in fact sure what "the best approach" is, or if there is one, or for that matter whether the future may bring different circumstances that require different adaptions, it's useful to keep around stuff that represents a huge amount of condensed information on something that worked even if we aren't entirely sure what to do with it right now. Our future selves/descendants will have more powerful tools with which to find new useful things. You also set up a false dichotomy where frankly hilariously (or not so funny depending on who you ask) minimal resource expenditure on language preservation is somehow a threat to world efficiency or something. Really? Edit to add: FWIW, software itself follows this logic too. Yes, sometimes a true total redo is useful. But there is a reason that a fetish for rewrites has been cited as a huge risk for decades [0] at this point. Working software years or decades old by definition inherently embodies a huge amount of hard learned lessons and wisdom. Some of which may be obsolete sure, but it can be very very hard to tell what is valuable and what isn't without going through all the same edge case breakages yet again. There's a lot there from people who are now gone and that may not be documented at all beyond the code. That's not to say everything is worth saving per se, but neither should it be dismissed without extreme care when it represents the collective effort of much time or many people or both. Particular since old stuff tends to be small and very cheap and easy at this point to preserve. It's hard to predict in the present what people decades/centuries down the line will find most interesting and be most curious (or desperate) to learn about us. ----- 0: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...