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> making everything easy for the novice at the expense of making it difficult for the seasoned professional. This would be a valid concern if there was only a

by goto11 5y ago

> making everything easy for the novice at the expense of making it difficult for the seasoned professional. This would be a valid concern if there was only a single programming language in the world. In reality there are thousands, some aimed at absolute beginners and some extremely complex and demanding, aimed for specialized professionals.

ModernMech 5y ago
This is true in a sense, but in practice the usage of languages follows a Poisson-like distribution. There are maybe a handful of languages used by maybe 80% of people, and then maybe a dozen or so used by another 10%, with the thousands of obscure languages used by a sliver of people. Many of those thousands have at best a single user, the creator of the language. And there is a cost to supporting lots of languages, because a language isn't just a compiler that takes up no room or resources. For a language to thrive it has to have a community, a development team, good documentation, integration with other languages and development tools etc. These things take money and power to bring them into existence, and there really only are so many good PL people in the world. It's not a super huge community of people, and we're not exactly churning PL experts out of colleges. These days the intro to AI will be waitlisted, but intro to compilers will be sending out e-mails reminding students the course still exists. And it's not like there are a lot of paid positions for PL devs anyway. If you want to work on a language you can find jobs at Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc., but if you want to work on your own idea then there's not a lot of money to be had. A couple have gotten lucky with startup capital (Eve, Dark, Enso), others have gotten corporate patronage (Elm), and others have gotten user patronage (Zig). But I don't know how deep those dollars go, and how many languages they can support. I'm not sure but I have a feeling it's not thousands of languages.

by goto11 5y ago

ModernMech 5y ago

This is true in a sense, but in practice the usage of languages follows a Poisson-like distribution. There are maybe a handful of languages used by maybe 80% of people, and then maybe a dozen or so used by another 10%, with the thousands of obscure languages used by a sliver of people. Many of those thousands have at best a single user, the creator of the language. And there is a cost to supporting lots of languages, because a language isn't just a compiler that takes up no room or resources. For a language to thrive it has to have a community, a development team, good documentation, integration with other languages and development tools etc. These things take money and power to bring them into existence, and there really only are so many good PL people in the world. It's not a super huge community of people, and we're not exactly churning PL experts out of colleges. These days the intro to AI will be waitlisted, but intro to compilers will be sending out e-mails reminding students the course still exists. And it's not like there are a lot of paid positions for PL devs anyway. If you want to work on a language you can find jobs at Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc., but if you want to work on your own idea then there's not a lot of money to be had. A couple have gotten lucky with startup capital (Eve, Dark, Enso), others have gotten corporate patronage (Elm), and others have gotten user patronage (Zig). But I don't know how deep those dollars go, and how many languages they can support. I'm not sure but I have a feeling it's not thousands of languages.