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Yes, it does. But you're totally ignoring the practical ramifications of this – the fact that ideas that are only now making it into mainstream programming lang

Yes, it does. But you're totally ignoring the practical ramifications of this – the fact that ideas that are only now making it into mainstream programming languages is a strong indication that the entire endeavour is more complex than you're admitting. We don't just pull language features out of our collective arses and start using them. Evolution does happen at a glacial pace – we stick features into minority-appeal languages; they kick around a bit; people rediscover these features later, and maybe they eventually end up in popular languages. But there's a huge amount more involved in that process than simply coming up with the feature - testing, maintainability, long-term implications, unforeseen complexity, programmer acceptance, performance constraints… the list goes on.

klibertp 12y ago
> testing, maintainability, long-term implications, unforeseen complexity, programmer acceptance, performance constraints… the list goes on. No, it's actually just "programmer acceptance" and secondary reasons like amount of money poured into marketing or language being tied to an OS. I'm not very pleased with this. In this talk: https://thestrangeloop.com/sessions/the-sociology-of-programming-languages https://thestrangeloop.com/sessions/the-sociology-of-program... it's said that probability of language being used is "potential gains/pain of adoption" ratio. That's true. Language designers, at least the ones who want their languages to succeed, constrain themselves to make it as painless as possible for "normal programmers" to pick up. Nobody seems to notice that there's another option of making denominator smaller: all you need is to become better at adopting new technologies. But this somehow doesn't work, because... Probably because of long-term implications or performance constraints, right.

klibertp 12y ago

> testing, maintainability, long-term implications, unforeseen complexity, programmer acceptance, performance constraints… the list goes on. No, it's actually just "programmer acceptance" and secondary reasons like amount of money poured into marketing or language being tied to an OS. I'm not very pleased with this. In this talk: https://thestrangeloop.com/sessions/the-sociology-of-programming-languages https://thestrangeloop.com/sessions/the-sociology-of-program... it's said that probability of language being used is "potential gains/pain of adoption" ratio. That's true. Language designers, at least the ones who want their languages to succeed, constrain themselves to make it as painless as possible for "normal programmers" to pick up. Nobody seems to notice that there's another option of making denominator smaller: all you need is to become better at adopting new technologies. But this somehow doesn't work, because... Probably because of long-term implications or performance constraints, right.