from Hacker News

Why programming languages matter [video]

by hazelnut-tree on 10/27/23, 8:53 PM with 124 comments

  • by pdimitar on 10/28/23, 2:09 PM

    Programming languages do matter but not as much as many people think f.ex. the HN crowd has a soft spot for LISP, and most of the don't even have proper parallel execution (and no I am not talking OS threads, having direct access to those should honestly be removed at one point). And sure, Racket and a few others are "Working on having an actor model". Wake me up when they achieve it. I am betting on somewhere in the 2030s, best case scenario.

    A combination of a good and restrictive language compiler (Rust, OCaml, Haskell) and an amazing runtime (Erlang) is the sweet spot that everyone should be aiming at.

    If anything, I am very tired of seeing yet another LISP dialect -- or any other language really, come to think of it now -- being announced. Many of us the programmers love to play and going to check on these languages is IMO taking away precious mind-share.

    If anything, in my eyes it's exactly because programming languages matter is the reason why we should have less of them. We should start folding some languages inside others. (Or abandon them.)

  • by mjfl on 10/27/23, 9:47 PM

    Very little innovation in programming languages has happened regarding new realities at the hardware level especially transition from serial to parallel execution.

  • by jokoon on 10/27/23, 9:40 PM

    oddly, there are very few job positions to work in things related to programming languages.

  • by Supermancho on 10/27/23, 9:39 PM