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No, no. Groups that have endless infighting/debates are the ones that evolve, stick around, and gain support. It's the groups that are cock-sure about everythin
by riskable 3y ago
No, no. Groups that have endless infighting/debates are the ones that evolve, stick around, and gain support. It's the groups that are cock-sure about everything with everyone falling in line behind the leadership that end up stagnating and ultimately end up being replaced with something better (often with bitter or explosive endings).
In the world of technology, fundamental tech like programming languages can persist seemingly forever but the truth is that there's great big winners and a whole lot of losers. We also don't like to compare seemingly-unrelated languages to each other because of their fundamental differences in how they're meant to be used but the truth is that a lot more people know and learn Python than will ever learn C or C++ (or Rust).
It's because C and C++ never really evolved into better languages. They never got rid of the bad ideas (e.g. goto) and just kept piling on new stuff, leaving new learners of the language just that much more to have to learn.
Languages like Rust and Python actually remove old, bad syntaxes/ideas and implement checks and helpful compiler messages regarding bad patterns. IMHO, this makes them vastly more likely to be around 25, 50, or even 100 years from now than languages (or OSes) that never remove technological debt.
- overgard 3y agoPython removing "bad" old ideas caused it to stagnate on 2.7 for a decade and probably did irreversible harm to the ecosystem as people left for languages that didn't have a nasty split in the community. C++ has evolved tremendously so I have no idea what you're talking about there. Removing "goto" would help nothing, and the more or less deprecated features keep old codebases alive while allowing for better things (shared pointers and so on)
- notmypenguin 3y agoNo mention of the fact that you cherry picked virtual machine languages, dynamic interpreted languages that don’t even exist without a garbage collector, a system memory allocator, and more, all written in C,C++, or Rust?