alt Hacker News> fantastic with both
Most developers evaluate programming languages by comparing features in isolation, never stepping back to consider the overall experience of using one.
Features are easy to talk about. They're discrete, nameable, and comparable. "Does it have Foo?" is a question you can actually answer. "What's it like to build and maintain a real system in language X for two or three years?" isn't. So people default to what's measurable.
Most devs haven't spent serious time in more than two or three languages in production. Without that contrast, the holistic experience is invisible - you don't know what you're missing, and you don't notice the pain you've learned to live with.
Language communities form around features because features make good rallying points. "We have algebraic types." "We have macros." These become identity markers. The holistic experience doesn't tribalize as cleanly - it's harder to put on a t-shirt.
There's also a sunk-cost angle: devs who've spent years in a language have every incentive to believe its features justify the investment. Honestly evaluating the overall experience might undermine that.
The irony is that the languages with the most devoted communities tend to be loved for exactly these holistic reasons - the ones that are nearly impossible to convey through a feature list. You can rave about Clojure or Elixir all day, but a curious newcomer will land on the homepage, scan the features, and walk away unimpressed: "Meh, it doesn't even have Foo. People say this is great? They clearly don't know what they're talking about."
Well in a recent project I tried TypeScript thinking, OK, LLMs, huge training corpus! massive adoption! api for everything already set up! swim with the current! and I tried various frameworks and so on, but for me reasoning about things and being able to make systems that I could adapt and pivot it was honestly inferior compared to niche Elixir and Clojure. But it's not like I hate JS; I use it in LiveView all the time. And don't mean to imply there are no problems in niche-land though; you've got to be willing to do more yourself and live in a tiny world. Really, LLMs kind of tamed Clojure for me because it seems so far at least that they can handle the glue code and stitching libraries together pretty decently as long as you don't get lazy with architectural choices and stay vigilant. And if I ever hire it pretty much has to be remote or learn on the job, though again LLMs reduce this pain greatly.