4 ms·

Evidence for the existence of factor B doesn't disprove the existence of factor A.

• brabel 3y ago
  While that's true, you would need to show evidence that factor A is more important than B in order to show that A is not a deciding factor. Factor B being "the loved languages are better languages"... I would say there's ample evidence that better languages are far from being more popular, and hence loved... Lisp is probably the poster child of _better languages_ according to many people, including me, but there are many others: Smalltalk, OCaml, Haskell, Erlang. Not to mention that showing conclusively that a language is "better" than another is incredibly hard, probably impossible as it just depends on too many factors, many of which are subjective. So your factor B is basically unmeasurable, which makes factor A a much more useful metric (easy to measure and arguably reliable until shown otherwise).
  • IshKebab 3y ago
    > Lisp is probably the poster child of _better languages_ according to many people, including me, but there are many others: Smalltalk, OCaml, Haskell, Erlang. I think you just have an unpopular view of "better". Lisp is weird to read and write. OCaml is ok but its infrastructure is arguably worse than Python's. I've been forced to use it recently and Opam is the most annoying tool I've used for quite a while. Haskell is simply too difficult for most people. I think it's pretty clear that algebraic effects are going to be much better than monads where you absolutely need purity, and I think most people don't care about purity most of the time. I have never used Smalltalk. Anyway, his "evidence" is equally consistent with A and B so it doesn't really show anything. > Not to mention that showing conclusively that a language is "better" than another is incredibly hard, probably impossible as it just depends on too many factors, many of which are subjective. Of course. But that obviously doesn't mean that all languages are equally good.