alt Hacker NewsFeels like all the write ups that point out the short comings of eg Python for scientific computing.
Sure, except that once you have a community at critical mass around a reasonably good tool, that trumps most other things. Momentum builds. People write tutorials, explainers, better documentation, etc. it hits escape velocity.
Feels like Lean, with Terrance Tao as a strong proponent / cheerleader, is in that space.
Everyone who argues “but language X is better” … may not be wrong, but they are not making the argument that matters. Is it better than the thing everyone else knows and can use and has more people hours going into it to improve it?
Feels like a “worse is better” situation; or maybe “good and popular is good enough”.
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> once you have a community at critical mass around a reasonably good tool, that trumps most other things
This matters a lot less in the age of AI. AI doesn't need a massive number of community-built libraries, it can just write its own. It doesn't need a million tutorials floating out there on the interwebs because unlike most programmers, it will actually read the spec and documentation (tutorials are just projections of the docs/spec anyway). AI doesn't have to avoid languages with no job market because it just needs to do the job at hand, not build a career. This makes it easier for small languages and DSLs to gain usage where they never would have before.
I think AI might spell the end of the language monoculture (top 20 are mostly slight variations on languages circling the same design) that has persisted in programming.
I think the point that LLMs should enable effective translation between different formalisms is a good one. So I don't see the choice as being a big issue. This is especially the case here because to a large extent the translations can be checked automatically.