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I don't do any systems programming, I only have a vague idea of the landscape of these languages and I have a question. What motivates people to invest the tim

I don't do any systems programming, I only have a vague idea of the landscape of these languages and I have a question. What motivates people to invest the time and effort to learn them and keep developing in them? There is a class of languages (Nim, Zig, D) for which I naively think "Well, they might have some good ideas but ultimately Rust is what will replace C and C++ over time". How do the creators stay motivated to put so much effort into building and maintaining these languages? Don't these languages feel like dead ends on the tech development tree or second-class at best in the sense that they will likely never get mass adoption? What am I missing?

_448 5y ago
> How do the creators stay motivated to put so much effort into building and maintaining these languages? Here[0] is Simon Peyton Jones going through the history of Haskell. Somewhere after 10:30mins into the video he answers your question. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06x8Wf2r2Mc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06x8Wf2r2Mc
- garmaine 5y ago
  I feel that Haskell is a bit of a different case though. Like Lisp and Forth, people use Haskell because they are attracted to something at the core of the language itself which no mainstream language has. It’s like the same reason people learn Lojban as a spoken language. For languages that are trying to be actual deployable systems programming compilers in widespread use, that intrinsic motivation doesn’t seem to be there I think.
rStar 5y ago
because they enjoy it, but also because they see opportunity in whatever set of features they themselves believe are important. Evolution(in this case survival of the fittest regarding developer mindshare) eventually decides.
planetis 5y ago
As a Nim user, I keep being motivated because it keeps evolving (like getting a new async implementation based on CPS, incremental compilation, destructors based stdlib), its easy to start using but can accommodate a multitude of use cases with many features. Last year its usage, in my experience, took off and its only getting more widespread organically, without advertisement and support by big companies.

_448 5y ago

> How do the creators stay motivated to put so much effort into building and maintaining these languages? Here[0] is Simon Peyton Jones going through the history of Haskell. Somewhere after 10:30mins into the video he answers your question. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06x8Wf2r2Mc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06x8Wf2r2Mc

garmaine 5y ago
I feel that Haskell is a bit of a different case though. Like Lisp and Forth, people use Haskell because they are attracted to something at the core of the language itself which no mainstream language has. It’s like the same reason people learn Lojban as a spoken language. For languages that are trying to be actual deployable systems programming compilers in widespread use, that intrinsic motivation doesn’t seem to be there I think.

rStar 5y ago

because they enjoy it, but also because they see opportunity in whatever set of features they themselves believe are important. Evolution(in this case survival of the fittest regarding developer mindshare) eventually decides.

planetis 5y ago

As a Nim user, I keep being motivated because it keeps evolving (like getting a new async implementation based on CPS, incremental compilation, destructors based stdlib), its easy to start using but can accommodate a multitude of use cases with many features. Last year its usage, in my experience, took off and its only getting more widespread organically, without advertisement and support by big companies.