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I, for one, adore the "avoid success at all costs" attitude The trappings of success for programming languages are pain and suffering, having your community in
by blasdel 17y ago
I, for one, adore the "avoid success at all costs" attitude
The trappings of success for programming languages are pain and suffering, having your community inundated with incurious idiots, losing the ability to do anything new and cool because you have to maintain stability for the horde.
Witness Alan Kay's experience with Smalltalk -- he was forced to fork himself and start over every time he succeeded in getting users.
- silentbicycle 17y agoIt's a great stance for a language that focusing primarily on research and innovation, but it does put a damper on getting things done sometimes. Some stability and concessions to practicality go a long way. I think that having a clean break at major revisions (e.g. Python 3, Lua 4.0 to Lua 5.0) and cleaning up cruft is probably a reasonable approach, as long as it's handled carefully and half the community doesn't stay with the old version. (It was easier with Lua because it's so small, and usually embedded in something else.)