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Discussion on: Why Every Programming Language is Terrible

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Magne • Edited

I share your sentiment. I think you might both hate and love the language outlines in this article I wrote:

Features of a dream programming language: 3rd draft - dev.to/redbar0n/features-of-a-drea...

Hate the language because of the vast collection of features in it, but love the language since it explicitly foregoes a multi-paradigm approach, and attempts to consolidate around a set of few core primitives (in the Lisp/Clojure tradition, but also in the spirit of Elm), seeking to simplify programming first and foremost.

I’d argue that features aren’t the problem per se, if they are designed into a holistic and cohesive experience from the start, but the problem the incorporation of non-idiomatic features from other paradigms/languages which are the problem: it creates a mess, esp when all permutations of those niceties combine and create complexity. A anecdotal story illustrating this is that Brendan Eich notes this about JS and the implicit type conversions between strings and ints. It was to please users who desperately wanted it to deal with data coming from a DB; he did it so that JS would gain popularity, but regrets it today: youtu.be/krB0enBeSiE Oftentimes: Everything that’s popular is wrong. (Tim Feriss)