Graydon may lament the features that got away, but being a good loser may be the best way to encourage contributions and to respond to community needs. The his

Graydon may lament the features that got away, but being a good loser may be the best way to encourage contributions and to respond to community needs. The historical forces on a language are both its constraints and its drivers. Languages that are nice conceptually are not responsive to history. Both Swift and Rust both veered away from their original champions. The champions helped by focusing the problem and providing a technical skeleton, but the need (the pain of C/C++/Objective-C) was both intense and complex, so the community was stronger than the BDFL model. Interestingly, Swift has seen Rust forge ahead on a number of fronts, but is quietly adopting the best of Rust, and soon interoperating with C/C++ will be frictionless. The ties to Apple are being loosened, with a more portable stdlib and a Foundation library that subsets the legacy Apple Foundation instead of dragging Apple API's into other platforms. If/since Apple is to rewrite its systems in Swift, Swift will likely evolve into the best language for migrating off C/C++. Compare Graydon, von Rossum, or Chris Lattner to Java's Mark Reinhold. Mark has been quietly at the helm of Java since 1997, navigating: the Oracle and open-source transitions, partners ranging from IBM to broad developer communities, continuous VM updates that kept Java relevant, and the quick pace of recent language/library upgrades: lambdas (method and field handles), vector processing and FFI, native...