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I'm a bit leery of that argument, because in my experience the most important component of a language is its ecosystem. By far. I've played with many really ni

by dmpk2k 13y ago

I'm a bit leery of that argument, because in my experience the most important component of a language is its ecosystem. By far. I've played with many really nice languages, but never used them seriously because they had no libraries (let alone quality libraries), had poor tooling, poor documentation, buggy runtime, and almost nobody to compare notes with. In my experience, the largest jump in productivity is libraries, not some feature of a language. On the one hand, languages are useful to explore a space. On the other, there's a lot of reinvented wheels going on here. If all languages stuck with the same ABI (e.g. C), it'd be one thing, because then you could use the same libraries and many tools between languages. Unfortunately, they often cannot, and thus you can't. There's some serious opportunity cost going on here. I'm happy using node.js at the moment (ooh, shiny!), but the current situation with a plethora of languages isn't exactly great either.

Lerc 13y ago
It is true that most of the best supported languages have been around for a good ten years. But each of those languages had a time when they were only a year old. I don't deny languages take time to mature. I feel like Haxe is about two-thirds of the way towards being properly Mature. It is approaching 10 years old, yet I feel like it is only just getting started, A lot of people still haven't even heard of it.
- tluyben2 13y ago
  Haxe is great but confusing for newbies. You can write anything to run on anything but with what libraries; tons of halfbaked thing around. The tutorials are per target which make it seem you can use the same language but have to write different code per platform. I like Haxe and tried it a number of times, but unless coming from Flash/AS it feels underdocumented and, in a lot places in the main site, quite dead. It's not but broken links, vital libraries which are unsupported etc.

by dmpk2k 13y ago

Lerc 13y ago

It is true that most of the best supported languages have been around for a good ten years. But each of those languages had a time when they were only a year old. I don't deny languages take time to mature. I feel like Haxe is about two-thirds of the way towards being properly Mature. It is approaching 10 years old, yet I feel like it is only just getting started, A lot of people still haven't even heard of it.

tluyben2 13y ago
Haxe is great but confusing for newbies. You can write anything to run on anything but with what libraries; tons of halfbaked thing around. The tutorials are per target which make it seem you can use the same language but have to write different code per platform. I like Haxe and tried it a number of times, but unless coming from Flash/AS it feels underdocumented and, in a lot places in the main site, quite dead. It's not but broken links, vital libraries which are unsupported etc.