5 ms·

Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail

94 points by jottinger 2mo ago

deleted 2mo ago
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iroddis 2mo ago
> For the person who only wants the notes, the sampler wins the job outright, completely. It will never play the wrong thing or at the wrong moment. For the person playing, it fails, because driving it costs more than playing, and it never touches the art at all. This entire essay could be about AI adoption as well. Some programmers love to program, and while AI is great at producing the code, it doesn’t really viscerally appeal if one loves coding itself.
- jottinger 2mo ago
  OP here. Yeah, you're not wrong. A lot of what IS driving AI code is that the writing code part isn't the intriguing aspect: it's designing, and the code generation is the grunt work that makes the design happen. And then you find out that most humans aren't that great at design: most programmers handwave their way through specifications, and thus the AIs do what they're told, and generate utter dreck, a lot like some of the "melody generators" do - they get handed very artificial constraints about what "good melodies" sound like, so they all sound very ordinary, because they STILL lack soul and replace inspiration with algorithm.
- deleted 2mo ago
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- klibertp 2mo ago
  > AI is great at producing the code It's not. The latest-and-greatest models on $200/mo subscriptions routinely produce bloated code full of boilerplate. They are incapable of producing elegant, concise, readable, correct-by-design code - they literally can't do it, even with the smallest samples, and it gets much worse as the scale of the implementation increases. You can't will the capability into them through prompts. You probably could do so with fine-tuning or other techniques, but I suspect that would just make the variance higher - and the average code quality would be much lower than it already is. The code generated by LLMs is passable, but never truly good. The same is true for LLM-generated designs and architectures, just even more so. They are trained on all the code out there, and the percentage of really good code is so vanishingly small that it's incredibly hard to replicate even for humans after a lifetime of learning. LLMs would need to reach a next level of capability to consistently recognize good code. Generating it consistently is out of the question for at least the next few generations of the AI. Not all code has to, or needs to, be good. LLM-generated code is useful and helpful. It's an incredible time-saver for one-off scripts, and you can make an LLM implement and maintain parts of the program you need, but don't care to make good at the moment. LLMs are very efficient (if we ignore externalities) and easy-to-use code generators, which is huge in itself. However, they are not great or even good at generating code. Last weekend, there was a post showcasing a Rust library with utility functions for writing parsers. It featured a simple line-by-line INI file parser. I decided to rewrite it in Python with PyParsing, a library I happen to know well. GPT-5.6-Sol High wrote the grammar that worked. It was tragically bloated, poorly factored, and multiple grammar problems were masked by parse actions. It worked, but it was decidedly bad code. I then rewrote the grammar by hand, getting it down to 1/3 of the length, eliminating all parse actions, and improving error messages in the process. I then spent 2 hours trying to convince the model to perform the same refactorings I did, but had to give up: no matter what I tried, the model couldn't get all the needed changes to coexist at the same time. When it got the terseness right, it inevitably ruined error handling. When it got the grammar right, it ruined the factoring. And so on. Later on, I decided to make the model rewrite the PyParsing grammar in Smalltalk's PetitParser - a pretty close match in terms of capabilities. I gave the model my version of the grammar. I told it to translate that Python code. It still butchered more than half of it, doing "optimizations" (the model's words) that replaced a cached production with a literal + 3 message sends in 8 places in the (trivial!) grammar. I explained what I value in the original code, why those are important features to keep, and tried again. It still couldn't give me an idiomatic Smalltalk translation, though it did get significantly closer. I concluded that the model has a very limited understanding of how concepts I wanted can manifest in actual code and called it a day. To give you an idea of the scale: excluding blank lines and imports, the grammar is exactly 10 lines of Python... So no - LLMs are not good at generating code. They are just fast and convenient, and again - that's huge. But it's nowhere near a level where it can be steered to produce good code - much less being able to generate good code by default. (I realize this post is a bit off topic and it's just an anecdote - but I've experienced this daily for the past half a year; I'm not basing my opinion on just that last attempt.)
  - jottinger 2mo ago
    Yeah, definitely on point. I use AI for code generation, but I ride herd on it quite a lot and I limit scope viciously and with hard rules about what the models are even allowed to generate. It's worked out pretty well, but it's hardly the "oh send a question get a full system back" that people try to pretend it is.
jdw64 2mo ago
I've also researched languages and written a similar piece[1]. Most successful languages had adoption momentum outside of the language itself. Conversely, there are many interesting failures—languages that were technically fascinating but ended up having their ideas stolen by later successful languages. A language isn't like a paper; it doesn't compete solely on the quality of its ideas [1]https://www.makonea.com/en-US/blog/programming-languages-are-authoring-tools-for-platforms https://www.makonea.com/en-US/blog/programming-languages-are...
- lyu07282 2mo ago
  I wouldn't call it stealing ideas, all languages build on ideas from older languages. language design is more akin to a academic discipline building on top of each other, languages have lineages like a family tree. Language users have usually no idea about the ancestry of the language they are using. Like Ruby borrowed heavily from Smalltalk, nobody is arguing Ruby stole from it. But I agree the adoption is the key factor, more people using a language grows the ecosystem and it becomes self perpetuating from there. This is why I disagree with the article, I don't think python is a good language but I still wrote hundreds of thousands of lines in it over the last decade, not because it's fun but because of its strong ecosystem fitting the task at hand.
purplemoonx 2mo ago
Boom: JavaScript Bust: Python
- jottinger 2mo ago
  I am not especially a fan of Python, myself, but I think most languages would LOVE to have a "bust phase" like Python does. If that's failure, failure's not so bad. :D
- grim_io 2mo ago
  Ridiculous. If anything, the time of the ubiquitous JS might be over when anyone can generate native UI without electron.
  - purplemoonx 2mo ago
    Has been trivial to do for 10+ years. Next you’re gonna say I need RN or Expo to write JS for iOS. JS ecosystem = capitalism, websites, payments Python = math, language, theory
    - grim_io 2mo ago
      How did all of the capitalism get to be JavaScript? Let's keep ourselves a bit grounded. No, payments certainly don't run on JavaScript, unless all you know about payment systems are the web frontends.
      - purplemoonx 2mo ago
        If you knew anything about payment systems, you'd know you get a nonce or receiptID and it is a front-end only thing. You don't do the backend banking yourself. Maybe your backend sends an email, or saves the receipt, but that's peripheral. The entire Payments flow is front-end capture, then the service doing all the actual backend payment part. It's a black box from your end and you can decide to do it entirely front-end if you wanted. There's no way around it.
lapcat 2mo ago
It's ridiculous to call Objective-C "a false start". 1) Objective-C is 40 years old. 2) Objective-C was used to create NeXTSTEP and by extension Mac OS X and iOS. 3) Objective-C is no more "awkward" than any other programming language. I actually prefer its verbosity to Swift's terseness. 4) Although Swift did eventually become more popular, the claim about Objective-C that "the moment Swift existed, it evaporated" is not only false but a gross exaggeration.
- jottinger 2mo ago
  OP here: Fair. Yet I'd say that it's relatively rare (while being completely absent in my experience) that anyone would choose ObjC today - and the article even mentions Pascal as a stronger example of the model you use with ObjC. ObjC survives today, as does Pascal, but its strongest impact is through influence, just as with Pascal. And languages being awkward is entirely a personal opinion, agreed. You might think in ObjC. I do not. There's nothing inherently wrong with either of us on those grounds.
  - lapcat 2mo ago
    > Yet I'd say that it's relatively rare (while being completely absent in my experience) that anyone would choose ObjC today There are a number of pragmatic reasons for this. Nobody is teaching ObjC anymore. Apple's documentation is now mostly Swift. Apple recommends Swift (and SwiftUI, despite the fact that many SwiftUI users have found it severely flawed). The job opportunities are mostly in Swift. I would say they're actually the same reasons people adopted ObjC back in the day. (Some other options were available, e.g., Carbon in pure C, Cocoa-Java.) Moreover, some newer Apple API are available only in Swift. Thus, Apple is pushing people into Swift whether they like it or not. > There's nothing inherently wrong with either of us on those grounds. Except that the thesis of your article depends on Swift being "more fun". My belief is that Swift became popular among Apple developers for the same reason that Objective-C did before: Apple promoted the language. People jumped on Swift because they felt it was "the future". Some people were already claiming in 2014 that every line of code you write in Objective-C was "technical debt". Such claims turned out to be absurd, because old ObjC code still compiles and runs, while Swift 1.0 code does not.
keybored 2mo ago
> Different diseases, one pathology.
- tom_ 2mo ago
  > Sort the corpses that way and they separate cleanly Just like when you get a bit of meat on the bone in a stew, and it all comes out as one piece - but it's just on the brink, and the slightest of touches with the fork is enough to make it separate cleanly, and it just slides off perfectly. I love it when that happens. I really feel like the author does too. That's part of why I like reading things written by people. Shared enjoyment of a shared human experience.
  - aj_hackman 2mo ago
    Here's another one of my favorites: pulling a huge weed out of soft, loose soil and hearing the crackle of the roots as they come up out of the earth.
rzwitserloot 2mo ago
To add a few more exotic cases that affect things. Keep in mind that by default new languages fail. To succeed, many things have to all go right at once, and this implies that therefore there is not one single element that, if gotten right, means the language will therefore be successful (it's rather the opposite: If even one of the key factors is wrong, it'll probably fail). * It's just a guesstimate, but one of those factors that caused java to be successful but-for (as in, if it hadn't had this, it wouldn't have been a success): It copies C style religiously anywhere it could get away with it. This caused some damage to the language that it has fixed in the past decade (such as the style and behaviour of `switch` being so bizarre - but it religiously follows exactly how it works in C!) * Some languages end up failing partly due to community outlook. Scala is somewhat well known for having a core community that is highly aggressive and elitist, or to be a bit milder, to be 'less accepting of newbies with a limited understanding of programming concepts' than is optimal'. And in addition to that, they are in contrast to the java ecosystem ready to drop support for stuff quickly, meaning: Real life actual use of scala as a basis means you're either working with a hopelessly obsolete codebase or you're spending time refactoring it every other month pretty much. Scala's adoption is fading and never got anywhere near its hyped future. * If a language is 'native to a platform' which I define as: "If the shepherds/owners of that platform were to write a basic app for their own platform, what language would they write it in? That's the 'native to that platform' language", then it tends to succeed even if it is not fun and not very well designed and even if transpilers exist. This is sufficient explanation for me for the success of javascript: It is the native-to-the-platform language if the biggest platform around. These all fit within the thesis. They're all (last one is debatable) very human factors.
- thefaux 2mo ago
  On scala, I think there were several factors that led to it stalling out in the mid to late aughts. I am not convinced the community was the root cause. I think more significant was the scala 3 transition. When they were still near the peak of the hype cycle, the core team decided to spend more than five years rewriting the compiler. In my opinion, while there were good reasons to do a rewrite, they focused on the wrong things if widespread adoption was the goal. The biggest problems with scala were compiler and sbt performance, as well as related dev tooling. The new scala 3 compiler had to first approximation equivalent performance to scala 2 and they did nothing to improve the build system. In the meantime, other languages that overlapped with scala in various ways rose up: kotlin, typescript and rust come to mind. The unique value proposition was diluted, and the poor tooling experience persisted. Now, that's not to say that the community was not also a factor in scala losing momentum. I agree with your take. At the same time, that elitist community was also building cool and useful stuff that significantly improved upon what was available in other ecosystems so I think it was a double edged sword. Even today, there are things that are easily done in scala that are useful, elegant and impossible to do directly in most of its peer languages. It may never have reached truly mainstream ubiquity but I think with better technical decision making, the language could have remained very strong its niche.
mojuba 2mo ago
Yes to all that but still, my pet theory is that languages rise on one or two "killer features" that move the entire industry forward, and not the overall cuteness or lovability. I can suggest a list of one killer feature per each popular language, i.e. things that these languages were the first to introduce and influence many successors: C: extreme conciseness C++: implicit destructors / RAII Python: removed curly braces Java: extreme portability JavaScript: erm... PHP: embedded in HTML by design Rust: compile-time memory management Swift: structured concurrency (pre-6 was probably just pure cuteness) etc.
- armchairhacker 2mo ago
  I believe JavaScript's was running in the web where Java could not (iPhones) or was considered too heavyweight (no startup). Then it became the true extremely portable language, because developers wanted a single language to write webapps in, and it was easier to get JavaScript running on their server than a new language running on every browser.
  - Jtsummers 2mo ago
    Javascript didn't need a plugin, unlike Java, and could directly alter the page contents. One of the first heavy uses was Google Maps, interactive JS-based applications took off at that point. Then with an army of web developers (meaning in browser), Node took off when it handed them a way to work on the backend in the same language. The iPhone came out after JS heavy pages came into existence, and might have accelerated the end of Flash and Java applets but the trend was already there.
    - oblio 2mo ago
      Gmail was the original AJAX woah! JavaScript application.
      - WalterSlovotsky 2mo ago
        Somewhat ironic, since AJAX was originally created by Microsoft to implement the Outlook web client.
jillesvangurp 2mo ago
There's more to a language than the syntax. The libraries, tools, and the ecosystem of developers, documentation, support, etc. are much more important. There are quite a few academic languages that are interesting to people that never really gain much traction because the people behind them just never commit to proper ecosystem building. Switching languages is a big time commitment. Or at least it used to be. I find myself more open to that now that I can hit the ground running with AI coding tools in most languages. But still, it's a time investment to learn a language, its idioms, its way of doing things, all the tools, libraries, and frameworks, etc. It's not something you do an in afternoon. And certainly not mid project. The languages that people gravitate to are the ones that look like they are safe, future proof bets. If you are going to spend all this energy learning one, you want to know it's a good investment. Successful languages have lots of users, decent tools, good libraries, etc. Or at least they look like there are serious people behind them. Many people make these bets early in their careers and then stick to them as well. I meet a fair share of people my age that are still sticking to Java. Because that's what they learned when they were in their twenties. I'm 51 now. Rust is a good example of a language that's hard to learn but managed to get off the ground because of the solid people behind it. It wasn't just an academic exercise: Mozilla was trying to solve a real problem and they managed to get a nice community behind the language and it grew from there. This is not something that happens a lot. People create new languages all the time. But many stay very niche and the projects around them tend to go stale very quickly if they fail to attract a community of users.
- purplemoonx 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - citelao 2mo ago
    I think the more appropriate analogy is there's more to a drill than the drill. When you buy a Milwaukee drill, because it shares a battery with other Milwaukee parts, it's easier to buy more Milwaukee tools. So it helps to choose a drill brand with the ecosystem you like, not just one that's a serviceable drill. (Or you could argue that a language's ecosystem is part of the dang language. Which I agree with).
Zak 2mo ago
I was hoping it would address Lisp. Lisp is fun. The interactivity and instant turnaround of a Lisp REPL is still rarely matched in other languages. Common Lisp also solved a significant issue other languages didn't address well until much later: the ability to write high-level code that was fast on cheap hardware around the turn of the millennium. Lisp didn't get popular around the turn of the millennium. Success stories like Naughty Dog, ITA, and Viaweb were rare, and the dominant languages seemed to be Java and various scripting languages starting with the letter P.
- Geof25 2mo ago
  I often hear about lisp but never actually figured out what tooling you need Is it interpreted or compiled language? Why should I use it instead of any other languages?
  - stackghost 2mo ago
    "Lisp" refers to several different languages in the same family, which contributes to the confusion. Perhaps the default choice is Common Lisp which itself is specified in an ANSI standard and has several competing implementations. Some are compiled, some are interpreted. Arguably the best is SBCL, which has a mature compiler and garbage collection. If you lean on implementation-specific features you can produce extremely fast code that approaches the performance of C in some benchmarks, but idiomatic and portable lisp is slower in practice. >Why should I use it instead of any other languages? The killer feature used to be the REPL. You can write the application function by function, and test the functions, data structures, or classes you write in the REPL as you're actively building the app. Nowadays with LLMs writing all the code, I honestly don't see much reason to reach for lisp. Agents don't require a REPL, and other languages have vastly superior library support.
    - red_admiral 2mo ago
      > You can write the application function by function ... and then use JUnit or TestNG in Java, or similar features in other languages. Which you can automatically run, including showing code coverage, both with a button in your IDE and as part of the CI/CD process when you commit.
aworks 2mo ago
I'm retired now but it never occurred to me the vocational languages I enjoyed most were all respectable or false starts (or obscure): FORTRAN, Pascal, Icon, Ada, Tcl. And in hindsight, I only grudgingly accepted the immortals, although I recognized at the time they would be widely adopted: C, C++, Java, Javascript, and Python. Is awk still respectable? Is it even a programming language?
- jottinger 2mo ago
  All of them are respectable. I've done most of those - Icon's new for me, and I don't think I've ever written anything in Ada either although I've come unfortunately close thanks to industrial requirements. I escaped! And yes, awk is a programming language. And respectable. I tend not to use it much any more, but that's because there are other things that feel easier than remembering the syntax. C'est la vie.
wollowollo 2mo ago
For quite a period up to LLMs, coders had high amounts of social power and gleefully asserted it by e.g. flouting dress codes and asserting their preference in tool choices. This is why we still see articles like this arguing everything from a point of view akin to that of a hobbyist, rather than articles by heads of engineering establishing that this kind of screwdriver is optimal for industrial automobile assembly.
- jottinger 2mo ago
  Note: am a head of engineering, and I've been writing code both as a vocation and a job for decades. I see it from a lot of sides; maybe not EVERY side, I'm not a machine (yet), but I don't think I have a singular myopic vision of ANY of it. YMMV.
hnlmorg 2mo ago
I tried to read this with an open mind but the premise of the article is so reductive I gave up quickly. There’s a whole plethora of reasons a language might fall in or out of favour. From ecosystem lock in (eg Objective-C was mandatory for Apple development prior to swift and Visual Basic was ostensibly killed by Microsoft during the dot net upsell) to fragmentation in the community (eg Perl vs Raku). These don’t mean the languages aren’t “fun” nor productive. Likewise, “fun” is such a subjective term that it’s utterly meaningless using it as any kind of yardstick. Esoteric languages are arguably the most “fun” but you don’t see companies running critical infrastructure on Brainfuck, Rockstar, nor lolcode. And to say Pascal, Perl and Objective-C were false starts only demonstrates the author hasn’t used any computers prior to 2010. Perl was the de facto sysadmin language for literally decades. Pascal was the microcomputer language of choice before C++ took over (even to the extent that some 80s OSs are Pascal projects), Objective-C only disappeared because Apple introduced Swift. And the authors comment about COBOL being retired is untrue for anyone who’s worked on critical banking software. I honestly think AI slop would have more value than this naive opinion piece.
- forinti 2mo ago
  Perl is still in every Linux. I just checked one of my Oracle installs and there are 725 .pl files. So it seems that is it still relevant.
  - jottinger 2mo ago
    exiftool is still best in class in its arena.
  - hnlmorg 2mo ago
    [dead]
- jottinger 2mo ago
  I was programming computers in 1981. Pascal and COMAL were among my first structured languages. Your comment on the "naive opinion piece" is taken as it is offered, and I'm happy to offer you a full refund on your purchase price of the essay. :D
cryptos 2mo ago
An interesting example to look at is Java vs. Kotlin. While Kotlin is a bit easier and definetly more fun, it didn't manage to gain a big market share in the Java space so far. I guess that this is the case, because Java is good enough and seems to be the safer bet (at least for managers).
51Cards 2mo ago
The stewardship and economics of the language can also be the issue. I started coding in the 80's and so web development for me evolved at the inception of the field. I will go to my grave insisting that Coldfusion was a better platform than PHP, but it was always commercial with a financial barrier to entry. PHP being free led to a glut of PHP developers, low-cost hosting, and an enormous ecosystem that ultimately redirected the course of the early web.
thataccount 2mo ago
I'm calling bull on this. Learning languages, at certain points, is always tedious. Whether that language is a computer language, or something like Greek, there comes a moment where "trudging" begins. The reason a person "trudges" is that they have a goal in mind that makes the trudging something to endure until that goal is achieved. Fun comes from not having to solve the same problem sixty times, or having to sort through a million files by hand when a program can do it in 3 seconds.
- jottinger 2mo ago
  Hmm. I find learning fun, no matter what the scope is - even Greek, which remains obscure to me. (Quick, ask me something about Greek! I'll nod wisely and stroke my chin in deep thought and then get distracted and wander elsewhere.) But you're not wrong: there's a fun discovery phase, then a "hey, does this actually work" phase, and then a "crap, I need to figure out how to MAKE it work" phase, all of which are decision points where one might choose to not bother.
  - card_zero 2mo ago
    It totally depends whether you're still experimenting and learning or not, which is totally circumstantial. Sometimes I slog through things at the start, on the promise that they will start to be fun once I see the point. Easiness is fun because it enables more messing around and learning. Not having to solve a problem is not fun, because problems are learning opportunities and are fun, unless they're just trivial obstructions in the way of the real problems of interest.
    - jottinger 2mo ago
      Indeed! That's how it works, pretty much every time, unless language choice is dictated from above, which ALSO happens. (And is why I know COBOL today, although I'm probably stronger on COBOL-77 than COBOL-85, when I STARTED COBOL after COBOL-85 was a thing.)
- turtlebits 2mo ago
  Maybe not "fun", but people have preferences, not necessarily rational, in the choices they make. Programming languages, technologies, and even fonts. Some languages are more enjoyable to use than others. I'm sure there are features/syntax/constructs in languages that you irrationally don't like.
internet_points 2mo ago
Heh, the article is kind of negative about Haskell's "success", but fun is exactly the reason why I still prefer Haskell over all other languages.
- oblio 2mo ago
  I'll be blunt about this: It's probably also the reason statistically no one will be employed to work on a Haskell code base. Same for Lisp, F#, OCaml, etc. They're the hot rods of the software development world where everyone uses SUVs.
- jottinger 2mo ago
  Hey, I actually made a point out of laughing about it even as I wrote it - see the footnotes. Haskell's dedication is actually quite remarkable and respectable, and it's not "against success" but against trading "correctness" for "success."
- pdimitar 2mo ago
  What kind of workplaces you people have if you can code "for fun"? I am tired of only ever being gauged by immediate usefulness. You hiring? Also when you emphasize "exactly", you are not giving any actual reasons.
  - jottinger 2mo ago
    I code for fun and income. I don't stay at engagements where I can't invest personally in what I'm doing, and I don't hire people who don't enjoy what they're doing as they're doing it. Anything else feels punitive for everyone involved.
cosmic_cheese 2mo ago
I would say that out of the box functionality (in the language itself or stdlib) makes a difference these days too. Older languages aren’t really subject to this, but new languages can be hard to justify bothering with if they require you to reach for third party libraries (and all the security issues, drama, etc those can entail) for somewhat common/basic functionality.
swiftcoder 2mo ago
> C, C++, and JavaScript are immortal (for now!), with Java a maybe Feels like someone hasn't spent much time in the enterprise. Java is still doing pretty good in that space
- jottinger 2mo ago
  Well, my real name is Joseph Ottinger. I've been writing about "the enterprise" and Java since around 2000, as editor for TheServerSide.com, Java Developer Journal, and writing multiple books on Java, as well as writing Java code for a lot of people for, well, decades. Java's doing all right. Java's "immortality" is still in question; it might be the next COBOL, but I don't pretend to know the future and I can see a world in which something eats Java's lunch TOMORROW, although I don't know what that something is yet.
nyeah 2mo ago
>That quote is the article, and it's a little surprising that it's buried so far into the content Is it really surprising in 2026? Today's online writing style is not primarily designed to communicate. It's designed to keep the reader 'engaged' for as long as possible. The reader's time is a resource to be extracted. I'm absolutely not poking this author individually. It's the writing style of the net
- jottinger 2mo ago
  Yeah, and I despise it. :D I purposefully expose the lede in my own articles early and often and as up front as I can make it - the editorial reviews keep saying "you should optimize for the clix, maing!" and ... no. If someone doesn't want to read the crap I come up with, I want them to know they don't want to read it right out of the gate, personally.
asa400 2mo ago
Unfortunate how many languages with interesting stories were either glossed over or omitted entirely. Clojure was an outright revolution against Java’s boring clumsiness, and many businesses are quietly making money with it today. Hickey even _explicitly_ comments on expertise (the OPs discussion about Rust and C++ being worth it) in the context of learning to play the violin. Ruby declared itself as being all about “programmer happiness”, and while probably not as specifically a rebellion against Java, it attracted a ton of burnt out Java people who went on to found thousands of startups on Ruby. Ruby continues to be massive for web apps, Rails is still extremely popular compared to many alternatives. Scala similarly to the previous examples was a Java-like with Haskell flavor that escaped an academic lab and accidentally took over the “big data” craze in the 2010s because they wrote Spark in it. If you were around then, Scala was truly hot at the time. There are others of course but I found the examples in the OP a relatively surface level analysis of a space that has experienced an absolute explosion of diversity and novelty in the last 20 years.
- jottinger 2mo ago
  Totally fair, but as I mentioned elsewhere, I left a lot of languages out in my consideration even when they're on my CV. Heck, I work in Java in my day job - I'm taking time away from it to write this comment - and realized after I'd finished my third draft that I didn't mention it at all. And I DO Clojure, have done Ruby, have done Scala (and will never do so again if I have any choice in the matter). I could have gone into each language as a sort of postmortem - even for the ones that aren't dead right now - but for every one of them there'd be a host of people saying "wait, you're wrong" and they'd be right, and maybe I would be in that host saying I was wrong at the same time. (Again, see the footnotes: it's right there!) But the piece isn't abotu a postmortem analysis of whether a language is fun or not - what I enjoy isn't going to be what you enjoy, nor should it be, and I don't care what you use, as long as you use it well and for the benefit of mankind.
nylonstrung 2mo ago
The problem here is that "mechanical empathy" is for most neurotypical humans at odds with fun. It's hard to say that static typing is "fun" but at this point the benefits are so abundantly obvious that it's been shoehorned into Python via Pydantic and MyPy/Ty I'd argue as well that "fun" for a lot of programmers seemingly entails over-abstracting, inventing complicated interfaces & following Clean Code dogma etc. I think there's an inherent tension between what's fun and what is actually good software from a purely mechanical standpoint of performance and functionality
lifefeed 2mo ago
I think in terms of niches and fitness Programming languages are under a Darwinism-like pressure of programmer's attention. They have to fit a niche, and the ones that fit the niche best, survive. What another commentator calls killed features is, to me, a way to fit a niche. Sometimes that niche is fun, like Python. Javascript's niche is that it's literally the only option. I suspect some languages (Java) fill a niche because they've been there for so long there's no oxygen for anything else to have a chance.
ellis0n 2mo ago
All languages are fun, but the most fun programming languages are ACPUL, Lisp and fun esoteric languages like Brainfuck. Enterprise made programming less fun while the most popular languages are popular mainly because huge budgets are allocated not only to promote them across every platform, but also to pay salaries.
npn 2mo ago
Agreed. I think people tend to forget that: you do not have to pick a single language. it is trivial to use another language just for that single library. there are many way to communicate, it is not like method calling is always the hard requirement since you do not have to choose a single language, the killer feature of that language is mostly useless, even if there is no other language that have the similar feature, people would just write a some glue code to bridge it with their main codebase. and usually, there is no such thing at unique feature that only that a single language can have. sure, it can be achieved easier in that language for some use case, but even so, a single bridge file is probably enough. aka nobody would invest in your language. writing software is mostly using other people libraries anyway. the thing we write the most is some common business logic, thus the syntax is extra important, or rather, the DX is the most important thing. heck if the experience is great enough I can throw thousands hours to write the libraries/frameworks myself, it is (usually) not that hard. it always turns me off seeing a new introduced language that syntax wise is a carbon copy of rust or C. no thank you, if you not even want to think about the syntax, why should we believe that you can deliver something truly innovative?

94 points by jottinger 2mo ago

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

> For the person who only wants the notes, the sampler wins the job outright, completely. It will never play the wrong thing or at the wrong moment. For the person playing, it fails, because driving it costs more than playing, and it never touches the art at all. This entire essay could be about AI adoption as well. Some programmers love to program, and while AI is great at producing the code, it doesn’t really viscerally appeal if one loves coding itself.

jottinger 2mo ago
OP here. Yeah, you're not wrong. A lot of what IS driving AI code is that the writing code part isn't the intriguing aspect: it's designing, and the code generation is the grunt work that makes the design happen. And then you find out that most humans aren't that great at design: most programmers handwave their way through specifications, and thus the AIs do what they're told, and generate utter dreck, a lot like some of the "melody generators" do - they get handed very artificial constraints about what "good melodies" sound like, so they all sound very ordinary, because they STILL lack soul and replace inspiration with algorithm.
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klibertp 2mo ago
> AI is great at producing the code It's not. The latest-and-greatest models on $200/mo subscriptions routinely produce bloated code full of boilerplate. They are incapable of producing elegant, concise, readable, correct-by-design code - they literally can't do it, even with the smallest samples, and it gets much worse as the scale of the implementation increases. You can't will the capability into them through prompts. You probably could do so with fine-tuning or other techniques, but I suspect that would just make the variance higher - and the average code quality would be much lower than it already is. The code generated by LLMs is passable, but never truly good. The same is true for LLM-generated designs and architectures, just even more so. They are trained on all the code out there, and the percentage of really good code is so vanishingly small that it's incredibly hard to replicate even for humans after a lifetime of learning. LLMs would need to reach a next level of capability to consistently recognize good code. Generating it consistently is out of the question for at least the next few generations of the AI. Not all code has to, or needs to, be good. LLM-generated code is useful and helpful. It's an incredible time-saver for one-off scripts, and you can make an LLM implement and maintain parts of the program you need, but don't care to make good at the moment. LLMs are very efficient (if we ignore externalities) and easy-to-use code generators, which is huge in itself. However, they are not great or even good at generating code. Last weekend, there was a post showcasing a Rust library with utility functions for writing parsers. It featured a simple line-by-line INI file parser. I decided to rewrite it in Python with PyParsing, a library I happen to know well. GPT-5.6-Sol High wrote the grammar that worked. It was tragically bloated, poorly factored, and multiple grammar problems were masked by parse actions. It worked, but it was decidedly bad code. I then rewrote the grammar by hand, getting it down to 1/3 of the length, eliminating all parse actions, and improving error messages in the process. I then spent 2 hours trying to convince the model to perform the same refactorings I did, but had to give up: no matter what I tried, the model couldn't get all the needed changes to coexist at the same time. When it got the terseness right, it inevitably ruined error handling. When it got the grammar right, it ruined the factoring. And so on. Later on, I decided to make the model rewrite the PyParsing grammar in Smalltalk's PetitParser - a pretty close match in terms of capabilities. I gave the model my version of the grammar. I told it to translate that Python code. It still butchered more than half of it, doing "optimizations" (the model's words) that replaced a cached production with a literal + 3 message sends in 8 places in the (trivial!) grammar. I explained what I value in the original code, why those are important features to keep, and tried again. It still couldn't give me an idiomatic Smalltalk translation, though it did get significantly closer. I concluded that the model has a very limited understanding of how concepts I wanted can manifest in actual code and called it a day. To give you an idea of the scale: excluding blank lines and imports, the grammar is exactly 10 lines of Python... So no - LLMs are not good at generating code. They are just fast and convenient, and again - that's huge. But it's nowhere near a level where it can be steered to produce good code - much less being able to generate good code by default. (I realize this post is a bit off topic and it's just an anecdote - but I've experienced this daily for the past half a year; I'm not basing my opinion on just that last attempt.)
- jottinger 2mo ago
  Yeah, definitely on point. I use AI for code generation, but I ride herd on it quite a lot and I limit scope viciously and with hard rules about what the models are even allowed to generate. It's worked out pretty well, but it's hardly the "oh send a question get a full system back" that people try to pretend it is.

jdw64 2mo ago

I've also researched languages and written a similar piece[1]. Most successful languages had adoption momentum outside of the language itself. Conversely, there are many interesting failures—languages that were technically fascinating but ended up having their ideas stolen by later successful languages. A language isn't like a paper; it doesn't compete solely on the quality of its ideas [1]https://www.makonea.com/en-US/blog/programming-languages-are-authoring-tools-for-platforms https://www.makonea.com/en-US/blog/programming-languages-are...

lyu07282 2mo ago
I wouldn't call it stealing ideas, all languages build on ideas from older languages. language design is more akin to a academic discipline building on top of each other, languages have lineages like a family tree. Language users have usually no idea about the ancestry of the language they are using. Like Ruby borrowed heavily from Smalltalk, nobody is arguing Ruby stole from it. But I agree the adoption is the key factor, more people using a language grows the ecosystem and it becomes self perpetuating from there. This is why I disagree with the article, I don't think python is a good language but I still wrote hundreds of thousands of lines in it over the last decade, not because it's fun but because of its strong ecosystem fitting the task at hand.

purplemoonx 2mo ago

Boom: JavaScript Bust: Python

jottinger 2mo ago
I am not especially a fan of Python, myself, but I think most languages would LOVE to have a "bust phase" like Python does. If that's failure, failure's not so bad. :D
grim_io 2mo ago
Ridiculous. If anything, the time of the ubiquitous JS might be over when anyone can generate native UI without electron.
- purplemoonx 2mo ago
  Has been trivial to do for 10+ years. Next you’re gonna say I need RN or Expo to write JS for iOS. JS ecosystem = capitalism, websites, payments Python = math, language, theory
  - grim_io 2mo ago
    How did all of the capitalism get to be JavaScript? Let's keep ourselves a bit grounded. No, payments certainly don't run on JavaScript, unless all you know about payment systems are the web frontends.
    - purplemoonx 2mo ago
      If you knew anything about payment systems, you'd know you get a nonce or receiptID and it is a front-end only thing. You don't do the backend banking yourself. Maybe your backend sends an email, or saves the receipt, but that's peripheral. The entire Payments flow is front-end capture, then the service doing all the actual backend payment part. It's a black box from your end and you can decide to do it entirely front-end if you wanted. There's no way around it.

lapcat 2mo ago

It's ridiculous to call Objective-C "a false start". 1) Objective-C is 40 years old. 2) Objective-C was used to create NeXTSTEP and by extension Mac OS X and iOS. 3) Objective-C is no more "awkward" than any other programming language. I actually prefer its verbosity to Swift's terseness. 4) Although Swift did eventually become more popular, the claim about Objective-C that "the moment Swift existed, it evaporated" is not only false but a gross exaggeration.

jottinger 2mo ago
OP here: Fair. Yet I'd say that it's relatively rare (while being completely absent in my experience) that anyone would choose ObjC today - and the article even mentions Pascal as a stronger example of the model you use with ObjC. ObjC survives today, as does Pascal, but its strongest impact is through influence, just as with Pascal. And languages being awkward is entirely a personal opinion, agreed. You might think in ObjC. I do not. There's nothing inherently wrong with either of us on those grounds.
- lapcat 2mo ago
  > Yet I'd say that it's relatively rare (while being completely absent in my experience) that anyone would choose ObjC today There are a number of pragmatic reasons for this. Nobody is teaching ObjC anymore. Apple's documentation is now mostly Swift. Apple recommends Swift (and SwiftUI, despite the fact that many SwiftUI users have found it severely flawed). The job opportunities are mostly in Swift. I would say they're actually the same reasons people adopted ObjC back in the day. (Some other options were available, e.g., Carbon in pure C, Cocoa-Java.) Moreover, some newer Apple API are available only in Swift. Thus, Apple is pushing people into Swift whether they like it or not. > There's nothing inherently wrong with either of us on those grounds. Except that the thesis of your article depends on Swift being "more fun". My belief is that Swift became popular among Apple developers for the same reason that Objective-C did before: Apple promoted the language. People jumped on Swift because they felt it was "the future". Some people were already claiming in 2014 that every line of code you write in Objective-C was "technical debt". Such claims turned out to be absurd, because old ObjC code still compiles and runs, while Swift 1.0 code does not.

keybored 2mo ago

> Different diseases, one pathology.

tom_ 2mo ago
> Sort the corpses that way and they separate cleanly Just like when you get a bit of meat on the bone in a stew, and it all comes out as one piece - but it's just on the brink, and the slightest of touches with the fork is enough to make it separate cleanly, and it just slides off perfectly. I love it when that happens. I really feel like the author does too. That's part of why I like reading things written by people. Shared enjoyment of a shared human experience.
- aj_hackman 2mo ago
  Here's another one of my favorites: pulling a huge weed out of soft, loose soil and hearing the crackle of the roots as they come up out of the earth.

rzwitserloot 2mo ago

To add a few more exotic cases that affect things. Keep in mind that by default new languages fail. To succeed, many things have to all go right at once, and this implies that therefore there is not one single element that, if gotten right, means the language will therefore be successful (it's rather the opposite: If even one of the key factors is wrong, it'll probably fail). * It's just a guesstimate, but one of those factors that caused java to be successful but-for (as in, if it hadn't had this, it wouldn't have been a success): It copies C style religiously anywhere it could get away with it. This caused some damage to the language that it has fixed in the past decade (such as the style and behaviour of `switch` being so bizarre - but it religiously follows exactly how it works in C!) * Some languages end up failing partly due to community outlook. Scala is somewhat well known for having a core community that is highly aggressive and elitist, or to be a bit milder, to be 'less accepting of newbies with a limited understanding of programming concepts' than is optimal'. And in addition to that, they are in contrast to the java ecosystem ready to drop support for stuff quickly, meaning: Real life actual use of scala as a basis means you're either working with a hopelessly obsolete codebase or you're spending time refactoring it every other month pretty much. Scala's adoption is fading and never got anywhere near its hyped future. * If a language is 'native to a platform' which I define as: "If the shepherds/owners of that platform were to write a basic app for their own platform, what language would they write it in? That's the 'native to that platform' language", then it tends to succeed even if it is not fun and not very well designed and even if transpilers exist. This is sufficient explanation for me for the success of javascript: It is the native-to-the-platform language if the biggest platform around. These all fit within the thesis. They're all (last one is debatable) very human factors.

thefaux 2mo ago
On scala, I think there were several factors that led to it stalling out in the mid to late aughts. I am not convinced the community was the root cause. I think more significant was the scala 3 transition. When they were still near the peak of the hype cycle, the core team decided to spend more than five years rewriting the compiler. In my opinion, while there were good reasons to do a rewrite, they focused on the wrong things if widespread adoption was the goal. The biggest problems with scala were compiler and sbt performance, as well as related dev tooling. The new scala 3 compiler had to first approximation equivalent performance to scala 2 and they did nothing to improve the build system. In the meantime, other languages that overlapped with scala in various ways rose up: kotlin, typescript and rust come to mind. The unique value proposition was diluted, and the poor tooling experience persisted. Now, that's not to say that the community was not also a factor in scala losing momentum. I agree with your take. At the same time, that elitist community was also building cool and useful stuff that significantly improved upon what was available in other ecosystems so I think it was a double edged sword. Even today, there are things that are easily done in scala that are useful, elegant and impossible to do directly in most of its peer languages. It may never have reached truly mainstream ubiquity but I think with better technical decision making, the language could have remained very strong its niche.

mojuba 2mo ago

Yes to all that but still, my pet theory is that languages rise on one or two "killer features" that move the entire industry forward, and not the overall cuteness or lovability. I can suggest a list of one killer feature per each popular language, i.e. things that these languages were the first to introduce and influence many successors: C: extreme conciseness C++: implicit destructors / RAII Python: removed curly braces Java: extreme portability JavaScript: erm... PHP: embedded in HTML by design Rust: compile-time memory management Swift: structured concurrency (pre-6 was probably just pure cuteness) etc.

armchairhacker 2mo ago
I believe JavaScript's was running in the web where Java could not (iPhones) or was considered too heavyweight (no startup). Then it became the true extremely portable language, because developers wanted a single language to write webapps in, and it was easier to get JavaScript running on their server than a new language running on every browser.
- Jtsummers 2mo ago
  Javascript didn't need a plugin, unlike Java, and could directly alter the page contents. One of the first heavy uses was Google Maps, interactive JS-based applications took off at that point. Then with an army of web developers (meaning in browser), Node took off when it handed them a way to work on the backend in the same language. The iPhone came out after JS heavy pages came into existence, and might have accelerated the end of Flash and Java applets but the trend was already there.
  - oblio 2mo ago
    Gmail was the original AJAX woah! JavaScript application.
    - WalterSlovotsky 2mo ago
      Somewhat ironic, since AJAX was originally created by Microsoft to implement the Outlook web client.

jillesvangurp 2mo ago

There's more to a language than the syntax. The libraries, tools, and the ecosystem of developers, documentation, support, etc. are much more important. There are quite a few academic languages that are interesting to people that never really gain much traction because the people behind them just never commit to proper ecosystem building. Switching languages is a big time commitment. Or at least it used to be. I find myself more open to that now that I can hit the ground running with AI coding tools in most languages. But still, it's a time investment to learn a language, its idioms, its way of doing things, all the tools, libraries, and frameworks, etc. It's not something you do an in afternoon. And certainly not mid project. The languages that people gravitate to are the ones that look like they are safe, future proof bets. If you are going to spend all this energy learning one, you want to know it's a good investment. Successful languages have lots of users, decent tools, good libraries, etc. Or at least they look like there are serious people behind them. Many people make these bets early in their careers and then stick to them as well. I meet a fair share of people my age that are still sticking to Java. Because that's what they learned when they were in their twenties. I'm 51 now. Rust is a good example of a language that's hard to learn but managed to get off the ground because of the solid people behind it. It wasn't just an academic exercise: Mozilla was trying to solve a real problem and they managed to get a nice community behind the language and it grew from there. This is not something that happens a lot. People create new languages all the time. But many stay very niche and the projects around them tend to go stale very quickly if they fail to attract a community of users.

purplemoonx 2mo ago
[flagged]
- citelao 2mo ago
  I think the more appropriate analogy is there's more to a drill than the drill. When you buy a Milwaukee drill, because it shares a battery with other Milwaukee parts, it's easier to buy more Milwaukee tools. So it helps to choose a drill brand with the ecosystem you like, not just one that's a serviceable drill. (Or you could argue that a language's ecosystem is part of the dang language. Which I agree with).

Zak 2mo ago

I was hoping it would address Lisp. Lisp is fun. The interactivity and instant turnaround of a Lisp REPL is still rarely matched in other languages. Common Lisp also solved a significant issue other languages didn't address well until much later: the ability to write high-level code that was fast on cheap hardware around the turn of the millennium. Lisp didn't get popular around the turn of the millennium. Success stories like Naughty Dog, ITA, and Viaweb were rare, and the dominant languages seemed to be Java and various scripting languages starting with the letter P.

Geof25 2mo ago
I often hear about lisp but never actually figured out what tooling you need Is it interpreted or compiled language? Why should I use it instead of any other languages?
- stackghost 2mo ago
  "Lisp" refers to several different languages in the same family, which contributes to the confusion. Perhaps the default choice is Common Lisp which itself is specified in an ANSI standard and has several competing implementations. Some are compiled, some are interpreted. Arguably the best is SBCL, which has a mature compiler and garbage collection. If you lean on implementation-specific features you can produce extremely fast code that approaches the performance of C in some benchmarks, but idiomatic and portable lisp is slower in practice. >Why should I use it instead of any other languages? The killer feature used to be the REPL. You can write the application function by function, and test the functions, data structures, or classes you write in the REPL as you're actively building the app. Nowadays with LLMs writing all the code, I honestly don't see much reason to reach for lisp. Agents don't require a REPL, and other languages have vastly superior library support.
  - red_admiral 2mo ago
    > You can write the application function by function ... and then use JUnit or TestNG in Java, or similar features in other languages. Which you can automatically run, including showing code coverage, both with a button in your IDE and as part of the CI/CD process when you commit.

aworks 2mo ago

I'm retired now but it never occurred to me the vocational languages I enjoyed most were all respectable or false starts (or obscure): FORTRAN, Pascal, Icon, Ada, Tcl. And in hindsight, I only grudgingly accepted the immortals, although I recognized at the time they would be widely adopted: C, C++, Java, Javascript, and Python. Is awk still respectable? Is it even a programming language?

jottinger 2mo ago
All of them are respectable. I've done most of those - Icon's new for me, and I don't think I've ever written anything in Ada either although I've come unfortunately close thanks to industrial requirements. I escaped! And yes, awk is a programming language. And respectable. I tend not to use it much any more, but that's because there are other things that feel easier than remembering the syntax. C'est la vie.

wollowollo 2mo ago

For quite a period up to LLMs, coders had high amounts of social power and gleefully asserted it by e.g. flouting dress codes and asserting their preference in tool choices. This is why we still see articles like this arguing everything from a point of view akin to that of a hobbyist, rather than articles by heads of engineering establishing that this kind of screwdriver is optimal for industrial automobile assembly.

jottinger 2mo ago
Note: am a head of engineering, and I've been writing code both as a vocation and a job for decades. I see it from a lot of sides; maybe not EVERY side, I'm not a machine (yet), but I don't think I have a singular myopic vision of ANY of it. YMMV.

hnlmorg 2mo ago

I tried to read this with an open mind but the premise of the article is so reductive I gave up quickly. There’s a whole plethora of reasons a language might fall in or out of favour. From ecosystem lock in (eg Objective-C was mandatory for Apple development prior to swift and Visual Basic was ostensibly killed by Microsoft during the dot net upsell) to fragmentation in the community (eg Perl vs Raku). These don’t mean the languages aren’t “fun” nor productive. Likewise, “fun” is such a subjective term that it’s utterly meaningless using it as any kind of yardstick. Esoteric languages are arguably the most “fun” but you don’t see companies running critical infrastructure on Brainfuck, Rockstar, nor lolcode. And to say Pascal, Perl and Objective-C were false starts only demonstrates the author hasn’t used any computers prior to 2010. Perl was the de facto sysadmin language for literally decades. Pascal was the microcomputer language of choice before C++ took over (even to the extent that some 80s OSs are Pascal projects), Objective-C only disappeared because Apple introduced Swift. And the authors comment about COBOL being retired is untrue for anyone who’s worked on critical banking software. I honestly think AI slop would have more value than this naive opinion piece.

forinti 2mo ago
Perl is still in every Linux. I just checked one of my Oracle installs and there are 725 .pl files. So it seems that is it still relevant.
- jottinger 2mo ago
  exiftool is still best in class in its arena.
- hnlmorg 2mo ago
  [dead]
jottinger 2mo ago
I was programming computers in 1981. Pascal and COMAL were among my first structured languages. Your comment on the "naive opinion piece" is taken as it is offered, and I'm happy to offer you a full refund on your purchase price of the essay. :D

cryptos 2mo ago

An interesting example to look at is Java vs. Kotlin. While Kotlin is a bit easier and definetly more fun, it didn't manage to gain a big market share in the Java space so far. I guess that this is the case, because Java is good enough and seems to be the safer bet (at least for managers).

51Cards 2mo ago

The stewardship and economics of the language can also be the issue. I started coding in the 80's and so web development for me evolved at the inception of the field. I will go to my grave insisting that Coldfusion was a better platform than PHP, but it was always commercial with a financial barrier to entry. PHP being free led to a glut of PHP developers, low-cost hosting, and an enormous ecosystem that ultimately redirected the course of the early web.

thataccount 2mo ago

I'm calling bull on this. Learning languages, at certain points, is always tedious. Whether that language is a computer language, or something like Greek, there comes a moment where "trudging" begins. The reason a person "trudges" is that they have a goal in mind that makes the trudging something to endure until that goal is achieved. Fun comes from not having to solve the same problem sixty times, or having to sort through a million files by hand when a program can do it in 3 seconds.

jottinger 2mo ago
Hmm. I find learning fun, no matter what the scope is - even Greek, which remains obscure to me. (Quick, ask me something about Greek! I'll nod wisely and stroke my chin in deep thought and then get distracted and wander elsewhere.) But you're not wrong: there's a fun discovery phase, then a "hey, does this actually work" phase, and then a "crap, I need to figure out how to MAKE it work" phase, all of which are decision points where one might choose to not bother.
- card_zero 2mo ago
  It totally depends whether you're still experimenting and learning or not, which is totally circumstantial. Sometimes I slog through things at the start, on the promise that they will start to be fun once I see the point. Easiness is fun because it enables more messing around and learning. Not having to solve a problem is not fun, because problems are learning opportunities and are fun, unless they're just trivial obstructions in the way of the real problems of interest.
  - jottinger 2mo ago
    Indeed! That's how it works, pretty much every time, unless language choice is dictated from above, which ALSO happens. (And is why I know COBOL today, although I'm probably stronger on COBOL-77 than COBOL-85, when I STARTED COBOL after COBOL-85 was a thing.)
turtlebits 2mo ago
Maybe not "fun", but people have preferences, not necessarily rational, in the choices they make. Programming languages, technologies, and even fonts. Some languages are more enjoyable to use than others. I'm sure there are features/syntax/constructs in languages that you irrationally don't like.

internet_points 2mo ago

Heh, the article is kind of negative about Haskell's "success", but fun is exactly the reason why I still prefer Haskell over all other languages.

oblio 2mo ago
I'll be blunt about this: It's probably also the reason statistically no one will be employed to work on a Haskell code base. Same for Lisp, F#, OCaml, etc. They're the hot rods of the software development world where everyone uses SUVs.
jottinger 2mo ago
Hey, I actually made a point out of laughing about it even as I wrote it - see the footnotes. Haskell's dedication is actually quite remarkable and respectable, and it's not "against success" but against trading "correctness" for "success."
pdimitar 2mo ago
What kind of workplaces you people have if you can code "for fun"? I am tired of only ever being gauged by immediate usefulness. You hiring? Also when you emphasize "exactly", you are not giving any actual reasons.
- jottinger 2mo ago
  I code for fun and income. I don't stay at engagements where I can't invest personally in what I'm doing, and I don't hire people who don't enjoy what they're doing as they're doing it. Anything else feels punitive for everyone involved.

cosmic_cheese 2mo ago

I would say that out of the box functionality (in the language itself or stdlib) makes a difference these days too. Older languages aren’t really subject to this, but new languages can be hard to justify bothering with if they require you to reach for third party libraries (and all the security issues, drama, etc those can entail) for somewhat common/basic functionality.

swiftcoder 2mo ago

> C, C++, and JavaScript are immortal (for now!), with Java a maybe Feels like someone hasn't spent much time in the enterprise. Java is still doing pretty good in that space

jottinger 2mo ago
Well, my real name is Joseph Ottinger. I've been writing about "the enterprise" and Java since around 2000, as editor for TheServerSide.com, Java Developer Journal, and writing multiple books on Java, as well as writing Java code for a lot of people for, well, decades. Java's doing all right. Java's "immortality" is still in question; it might be the next COBOL, but I don't pretend to know the future and I can see a world in which something eats Java's lunch TOMORROW, although I don't know what that something is yet.

nyeah 2mo ago

>That quote is the article, and it's a little surprising that it's buried so far into the content Is it really surprising in 2026? Today's online writing style is not primarily designed to communicate. It's designed to keep the reader 'engaged' for as long as possible. The reader's time is a resource to be extracted. I'm absolutely not poking this author individually. It's the writing style of the net

jottinger 2mo ago
Yeah, and I despise it. :D I purposefully expose the lede in my own articles early and often and as up front as I can make it - the editorial reviews keep saying "you should optimize for the clix, maing!" and ... no. If someone doesn't want to read the crap I come up with, I want them to know they don't want to read it right out of the gate, personally.

asa400 2mo ago

Unfortunate how many languages with interesting stories were either glossed over or omitted entirely. Clojure was an outright revolution against Java’s boring clumsiness, and many businesses are quietly making money with it today. Hickey even _explicitly_ comments on expertise (the OPs discussion about Rust and C++ being worth it) in the context of learning to play the violin. Ruby declared itself as being all about “programmer happiness”, and while probably not as specifically a rebellion against Java, it attracted a ton of burnt out Java people who went on to found thousands of startups on Ruby. Ruby continues to be massive for web apps, Rails is still extremely popular compared to many alternatives. Scala similarly to the previous examples was a Java-like with Haskell flavor that escaped an academic lab and accidentally took over the “big data” craze in the 2010s because they wrote Spark in it. If you were around then, Scala was truly hot at the time. There are others of course but I found the examples in the OP a relatively surface level analysis of a space that has experienced an absolute explosion of diversity and novelty in the last 20 years.

jottinger 2mo ago
Totally fair, but as I mentioned elsewhere, I left a lot of languages out in my consideration even when they're on my CV. Heck, I work in Java in my day job - I'm taking time away from it to write this comment - and realized after I'd finished my third draft that I didn't mention it at all. And I DO Clojure, have done Ruby, have done Scala (and will never do so again if I have any choice in the matter). I could have gone into each language as a sort of postmortem - even for the ones that aren't dead right now - but for every one of them there'd be a host of people saying "wait, you're wrong" and they'd be right, and maybe I would be in that host saying I was wrong at the same time. (Again, see the footnotes: it's right there!) But the piece isn't abotu a postmortem analysis of whether a language is fun or not - what I enjoy isn't going to be what you enjoy, nor should it be, and I don't care what you use, as long as you use it well and for the benefit of mankind.

nylonstrung 2mo ago

The problem here is that "mechanical empathy" is for most neurotypical humans at odds with fun. It's hard to say that static typing is "fun" but at this point the benefits are so abundantly obvious that it's been shoehorned into Python via Pydantic and MyPy/Ty I'd argue as well that "fun" for a lot of programmers seemingly entails over-abstracting, inventing complicated interfaces & following Clean Code dogma etc. I think there's an inherent tension between what's fun and what is actually good software from a purely mechanical standpoint of performance and functionality

lifefeed 2mo ago

I think in terms of niches and fitness Programming languages are under a Darwinism-like pressure of programmer's attention. They have to fit a niche, and the ones that fit the niche best, survive. What another commentator calls killed features is, to me, a way to fit a niche. Sometimes that niche is fun, like Python. Javascript's niche is that it's literally the only option. I suspect some languages (Java) fill a niche because they've been there for so long there's no oxygen for anything else to have a chance.

ellis0n 2mo ago

All languages are fun, but the most fun programming languages are ACPUL, Lisp and fun esoteric languages like Brainfuck. Enterprise made programming less fun while the most popular languages are popular mainly because huge budgets are allocated not only to promote them across every platform, but also to pay salaries.

npn 2mo ago

Agreed. I think people tend to forget that: you do not have to pick a single language. it is trivial to use another language just for that single library. there are many way to communicate, it is not like method calling is always the hard requirement since you do not have to choose a single language, the killer feature of that language is mostly useless, even if there is no other language that have the similar feature, people would just write a some glue code to bridge it with their main codebase. and usually, there is no such thing at unique feature that only that a single language can have. sure, it can be achieved easier in that language for some use case, but even so, a single bridge file is probably enough. aka nobody would invest in your language. writing software is mostly using other people libraries anyway. the thing we write the most is some common business logic, thus the syntax is extra important, or rather, the DX is the most important thing. heck if the experience is great enough I can throw thousands hours to write the libraries/frameworks myself, it is (usually) not that hard. it always turns me off seeing a new introduced language that syntax wise is a carbon copy of rust or C. no thank you, if you not even want to think about the syntax, why should we believe that you can deliver something truly innovative?