alt Hacker NewsBecause It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail
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I was hoping it would address Lisp.
Lisp is fun. The interactivity and instant turnaround of a Lisp REPL is still rarely matched in other languages. Common Lisp also solved a significant issue other languages didn't address well until much later: the ability to write high-level code that was fast on cheap hardware around the turn of the millennium.
Lisp didn't get popular around the turn of the millennium. Success stories like Naughty Dog, ITA, and Viaweb were rare, and the dominant languages seemed to be Java and various scripting languages starting with the letter P.
I'm calling bull on this. Learning languages, at certain points, is always tedious. Whether that language is a computer language, or something like Greek, there comes a moment where "trudging" begins. The reason a person "trudges" is that they have a goal in mind that makes the trudging something to endure until that goal is achieved. Fun comes from not having to solve the same problem sixty times, or having to sort through a million files by hand when a program can do it in 3 seconds.
To add a few more exotic cases that affect things. Keep in mind that by default new languages fail. To succeed, many things have to all go right at once, and this implies that therefore there is not one single element that, if gotten right, means the language will therefore be successful (it's rather the opposite: If even one of the key factors is wrong, it'll probably fail).
* It's just a guesstimate, but one of those factors that caused java to be successful but-for (as in, if it hadn't had this, it wouldn't have been a success): It copies C style religiously anywhere it could get away with it. This caused some damage to the language that it has fixed in the past decade (such as the style and behaviour of `switch` being so bizarre - but it religiously follows exactly how it works in C!)
* Some languages end up failing partly due to community outlook. Scala is somewhat well known for having a core community that is highly aggressive and elitist, or to be a bit milder, to be 'less accepting of newbies with a limited understanding of programming concepts' than is optimal'. And in addition to that, they are in contrast to the java ecosystem ready to drop support for stuff quickly, meaning: Real life actual use of scala as a basis means you're either working with a hopelessly obsolete codebase or you're spending time refactoring it every other month pretty much. Scala's adoption is fading and never got anywhere near its hyped future.
* If a language is 'native to a platform' which I define as: "If the shepherds/owners of that platform were to write a basic app for their own platform, what language would they write it in? That's the 'native to that platform' language", then it tends to succeed even if it is not fun and not very well designed and even if transpilers exist. This is sufficient explanation for me for the success of javascript: It is the native-to-the-platform language if the biggest platform around.
These all fit within the thesis. They're all (last one is debatable) very human factors.
The stewardship and economics of the language can also be the issue. I started coding in the 80's and so web development for me evolved at the inception of the field. I will go to my grave insisting that Coldfusion was a better platform than PHP, but it was always commercial with a financial barrier to entry. PHP being free led to a glut of PHP developers, low-cost hosting, and an enormous ecosystem that ultimately redirected the course of the early web.
Yes to all that but still, my pet theory is that languages rise on one or two "killer features" that move the entire industry forward, and not the overall cuteness or lovability.
I can suggest a list of one killer feature per each popular language, i.e. things that these languages were the first to introduce and influence many successors:
C: extreme conciseness
C++: implicit destructors / RAII
Python: removed curly braces
Java: extreme portability
JavaScript: erm...
PHP: embedded in HTML by design
Rust: compile-time memory management
Swift: structured concurrency (pre-6 was probably just pure cuteness)
etc.
I would say that out of the box functionality (in the language itself or stdlib) makes a difference these days too. Older languages aren’t really subject to this, but new languages can be hard to justify bothering with if they require you to reach for third party libraries (and all the security issues, drama, etc those can entail) for somewhat common/basic functionality.
> C, C++, and JavaScript are immortal (for now!), with Java a maybe
Feels like someone hasn't spent much time in the enterprise. Java is still doing pretty good in that space
An interesting example to look at is Java vs. Kotlin. While Kotlin is a bit easier and definetly more fun, it didn't manage to gain a big market share in the Java space so far. I guess that this is the case, because Java is good enough and seems to be the safer bet (at least for managers).
I tried to read this with an open mind but the premise of the article is so reductive I gave up quickly.
There’s a whole plethora of reasons a language might fall in or out of favour. From ecosystem lock in (eg Objective-C was mandatory for Apple development prior to swift and Visual Basic was ostensibly killed by Microsoft during the dot net upsell) to fragmentation in the community (eg Perl vs Raku). These don’t mean the languages aren’t “fun” nor productive.
Likewise, “fun” is such a subjective term that it’s utterly meaningless using it as any kind of yardstick. Esoteric languages are arguably the most “fun” but you don’t see companies running critical infrastructure on Brainfuck, Rockstar, nor lolcode.
And to say Pascal, Perl and Objective-C were false starts only demonstrates the author hasn’t used any computers prior to 2010. Perl was the de facto sysadmin language for literally decades. Pascal was the microcomputer language of choice before C++ took over (even to the extent that some 80s OSs are Pascal projects), Objective-C only disappeared because Apple introduced Swift. And the authors comment about COBOL being retired is untrue for anyone who’s worked on critical banking software.
I honestly think AI slop would have more value than this naive opinion piece.
For quite a period up to LLMs, coders had high amounts of social power and gleefully asserted it by e.g. flouting dress codes and asserting their preference in tool choices. This is why we still see articles like this arguing everything from a point of view akin to that of a hobbyist, rather than articles by heads of engineering establishing that this kind of screwdriver is optimal for industrial automobile assembly.
I'm retired now but it never occurred to me the vocational languages I enjoyed most were all respectable or false starts (or obscure): FORTRAN, Pascal, Icon, Ada, Tcl.
And in hindsight, I only grudgingly accepted the immortals, although I recognized at the time they would be widely adopted: C, C++, Java, Javascript, and Python.
Is awk still respectable? Is it even a programming language?
Heh, the article is kind of negative about Haskell's "success", but fun is exactly the reason why I still prefer Haskell over all other languages.
> For the person who only wants the notes, the sampler wins the job outright, completely. It will never play the wrong thing or at the wrong moment. For the person playing, it fails, because driving it costs more than playing, and it never touches the art at all.
This entire essay could be about AI adoption as well. Some programmers love to program, and while AI is great at producing the code, it doesn’t really viscerally appeal if one loves coding itself.
It's ridiculous to call Objective-C "a false start".
1) Objective-C is 40 years old.
2) Objective-C was used to create NeXTSTEP and by extension Mac OS X and iOS.
3) Objective-C is no more "awkward" than any other programming language. I actually prefer its verbosity to Swift's terseness.
4) Although Swift did eventually become more popular, the claim about Objective-C that "the moment Swift existed, it evaporated" is not only false but a gross exaggeration.
I've also researched languages and written a similar piece[1]. Most successful languages had adoption momentum outside of the language itself. Conversely, there are many interesting failures—languages that were technically fascinating but ended up having their ideas stolen by later successful languages. A language isn't like a paper; it doesn't compete solely on the quality of its ideas [1]https://www.makonea.com/en-US/blog/programming-languages-are...
There's more to a language than the syntax. The libraries, tools, and the ecosystem of developers, documentation, support, etc. are much more important. There are quite a few academic languages that are interesting to people that never really gain much traction because the people behind them just never commit to proper ecosystem building.
Switching languages is a big time commitment. Or at least it used to be. I find myself more open to that now that I can hit the ground running with AI coding tools in most languages. But still, it's a time investment to learn a language, its idioms, its way of doing things, all the tools, libraries, and frameworks, etc. It's not something you do an in afternoon. And certainly not mid project.
The languages that people gravitate to are the ones that look like they are safe, future proof bets. If you are going to spend all this energy learning one, you want to know it's a good investment. Successful languages have lots of users, decent tools, good libraries, etc. Or at least they look like there are serious people behind them. Many people make these bets early in their careers and then stick to them as well. I meet a fair share of people my age that are still sticking to Java. Because that's what they learned when they were in their twenties. I'm 51 now.
Rust is a good example of a language that's hard to learn but managed to get off the ground because of the solid people behind it. It wasn't just an academic exercise: Mozilla was trying to solve a real problem and they managed to get a nice community behind the language and it grew from there. This is not something that happens a lot. People create new languages all the time. But many stay very niche and the projects around them tend to go stale very quickly if they fail to attract a community of users.