3 ms·

I'm interested what are the roots of this common "toy language" perception? Is it the association with learning to program and for this reason with kids? Or i

I'm interested what are the roots of this common "toy language" perception? Is it the association with learning to program and for this reason with kids? Or is it just the syntax that makes more sense to uninitiated, and thus less like some secret knowledge passed only to the worthy?

Tozen 3y ago
A good argument can be made that it comes from the machinations of Bell Labs (AT&T) and their promotion of C (and later C++). Debatably, a concerted effort was made to attack and belittle Pascal in the media, to get it out of the way. Many people seem to refer to Pascal with a very odd hostility or unknowingly regurgitate talking points originating from Bell Labs, and as if the language froze in time and stayed the same as it was in the 1970s.
rob74 3y ago
Well, a language that's friendly to newbies will also be used by newbies (also leading to some projects or code that are maybe not that good), so more advanced developers (or those who consider themselves more advanced) will have a tendency to turn their nose up. Something similar is currently going on with Rust vs. Go I suspect...
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  To me it was a lot that it was so wordy and had weird syntax. Semicolon as a separator instead of "end of this line or statement" felt just insane to someone who just had understood (not really, even) how an assembler worked. I think if it had more C like syntax and was sold as "C, but hardly any footguns", I would have liked it much better. I don't even know what was Pascal and what was Borland stuff, but I remember that I was reluctantly very impressed with its "module" system or whatever it had instead of .obj and .h files.
- DeathArrow 3y ago
  Just that Go has 10x developers and projects that Rust has. And most Go projects are commercially supported while Rust projects are mostly done for free projects in the line of "let's rewrite X in Rust". If you follow the money, there's where the developers are. And where the developers are, there is the success of a programming language. If it ever was a Rust vs Go contest, Go already won and by a big margin. I can't explain it very good, but I feel like a lot of weird people enjoy Rust and Scala for all the wrong reasons. It's like they enjoy the pain and want that pain to be inflicted to others so they push for those languages.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    I agree with your premise, not your conclusion. I have resigned to rust eating the software world. It's not backed by anything, yet it creeps in everywhere. You can stop it, but it's hard work and if you ever has as much as a hairline crack in the Porcelaine, Rust will get there, eventually.
- Patrickmi 3y ago
  [dead]

Tozen 3y ago

A good argument can be made that it comes from the machinations of Bell Labs (AT&T) and their promotion of C (and later C++). Debatably, a concerted effort was made to attack and belittle Pascal in the media, to get it out of the way. Many people seem to refer to Pascal with a very odd hostility or unknowingly regurgitate talking points originating from Bell Labs, and as if the language froze in time and stayed the same as it was in the 1970s.

rob74 3y ago

Well, a language that's friendly to newbies will also be used by newbies (also leading to some projects or code that are maybe not that good), so more advanced developers (or those who consider themselves more advanced) will have a tendency to turn their nose up. Something similar is currently going on with Rust vs. Go I suspect...

actionfromafar 3y ago
To me it was a lot that it was so wordy and had weird syntax. Semicolon as a separator instead of "end of this line or statement" felt just insane to someone who just had understood (not really, even) how an assembler worked. I think if it had more C like syntax and was sold as "C, but hardly any footguns", I would have liked it much better. I don't even know what was Pascal and what was Borland stuff, but I remember that I was reluctantly very impressed with its "module" system or whatever it had instead of .obj and .h files.
DeathArrow 3y ago
Just that Go has 10x developers and projects that Rust has. And most Go projects are commercially supported while Rust projects are mostly done for free projects in the line of "let's rewrite X in Rust". If you follow the money, there's where the developers are. And where the developers are, there is the success of a programming language. If it ever was a Rust vs Go contest, Go already won and by a big margin. I can't explain it very good, but I feel like a lot of weird people enjoy Rust and Scala for all the wrong reasons. It's like they enjoy the pain and want that pain to be inflicted to others so they push for those languages.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  I agree with your premise, not your conclusion. I have resigned to rust eating the software world. It's not backed by anything, yet it creeps in everywhere. You can stop it, but it's hard work and if you ever has as much as a hairline crack in the Porcelaine, Rust will get there, eventually.
Patrickmi 3y ago
[dead]