Comment on Why are so many new programming languages being developed?
AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev 1 week ago
A lot of the time, a new language is created to make one particularly difficult thing easy.
For Go, that one thing was concurrency. You CAN do concurrency in C or Python or whatever, but it’s not really built into the language.
For Rust, that one thing was memory safety. C leaves it all up to you, so it’s very easy to make mistakes that lead to memory leaks, crashes, or security vulnerabilities.
If you program in any language for a significant amount of time, you’re bound to find a few things that you do a million times that you wish were easier to do right and harder to do wrong. Some people see those problems and say “I can make something better”.
benjirenji@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
But if a language makes a particular thing easy, it also forces you to adopt a certain premise and accept the way the language solves that particular problem. This also limits you.
Every new language wants you to accept a new premise.
I’ve got a friend who rewrote parts of the C++ standard lib to optimize it for his purposes. I guess an STL isn’t the same as a language, but my friend’s efforts is maybe a small version of people recreating a new language to solve a problem.