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> I find the question really odd. It is like asking why people create new recipes This analogy missed the point. It's about recipes written in a new language b

> I find the question really odd. It is like asking why people create new recipes This analogy missed the point. It's about recipes written in a new language barely spoken by anyone, like elvish or klingon. Writing Romulan ale recipes in klingon is totally fine if you are targeting people on a star-trek convention, and want to start a romulan-klingon fight. But writing the only one documentation of a critical system in klingon at a public company sounds crazy, even if you can reduce the LOC (lines written) by 10% due to the nice and unique grammar of klingon (I mad this one up, I have no clue about klingon). Guess what, no sane person would want to work with that documentation, unique klingon grammar or not. You just have to take a look at Esperanto, the "an easy and flexible language - created by Zamenhof - that would serve as a universal second language to foster world peace and international understanding, and to build a 'community of speakers', as he believed that one could not have a language without such a community." After 130 years still no one speaks it, and English is the common language in the western world. Which - considering its shortcomings - is like if everyone of us would mainly code in COBOL, just because everyone can code in COBOL. tl,dr: normal human beings don't want to learn 2 new languages every year, just because [put a random argument here]. Why should we? [edit: typos]

brainless 6y ago
Very good points here, but you have to keep in mind this is not a small group of people pushing ideas down the throat of others. There are perhaps 10+ million programmers in the wild if you include those who are not professional or full-time. Someone creates a language because they might simply want to learn. Their friend picks it up, has fun, spreads the word. It either dies after a few months or becomes an edge case language in the stack of a company. Someone writes a blog and then it gets more traction. No one actually intends that everyone should learn 2 new languages. But we live on a large planet, people forget that frequently. The social consciousness that is easily accessible from within US might not be in India. So people here might create a language for some issues that already have a language in the US. What is wrong in that?

brainless 6y ago

Very good points here, but you have to keep in mind this is not a small group of people pushing ideas down the throat of others. There are perhaps 10+ million programmers in the wild if you include those who are not professional or full-time. Someone creates a language because they might simply want to learn. Their friend picks it up, has fun, spreads the word. It either dies after a few months or becomes an edge case language in the stack of a company. Someone writes a blog and then it gets more traction. No one actually intends that everyone should learn 2 new languages. But we live on a large planet, people forget that frequently. The social consciousness that is easily accessible from within US might not be in India. So people here might create a language for some issues that already have a language in the US. What is wrong in that?