> But Rust is better in the same way that Betamax was better than VHS, Mastodon is better than Twitter, Dvorak keyboards are better than QWERTY, Esperanto is better than English and Lua is better than Javascript

Esperanto is certainly not better than English; and I really doubt Lua is better than Javascript.

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david-gpu 8 months ago | parent | next [-]

> Esperanto is certainly not better than English; and I really doubt Lua is better than Javascript

Doesn't that depend on how one decides to "score" a language? And I think that's what the author is getting at, too.

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flysand7 8 months ago | parent | next [-]

I caught a different meaning from this entire sentence. I think the author was alluding to the fact that even if you replace a technology with something "better", at the end it doesn't matter, because Most People will keep using Twitter, Most People will keep using QWERTY layout, count all of your acquaintances, I doubt any of them speak Esperanto.

Well at least the idea comes through, but I don't think it makes sense to argue whether Lua is actually better than JavaScript or not.

	▲	david-gpu 8 months ago \| parent [-]
		Indeed. If one primarily values certain technical aspects, Beta was "better" than VHS. But if one primarily values popularity, profitability or practicality, then VHS was "better". And so on with the other examples. So when we go back to this: > Esperanto is certainly not better than English; and I really doubt Lua is better than Javascript All I get from it is "I personally have a strong opinion about what makes a language 'better'". Nothing wrong with that, but it's independent from the argument made by TFA. Perhaps I misinterpreted.

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coldtea 8 months ago | parent | prev [-]

>Doesn't that depend on how one decides to "score" a language?

Not as much, because not all ways of scoring a language are as good either, and in the ways of scoring that matter, English is better than Esperanto.

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johnnyanmac 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

>not all ways of scoring a language are as good either

I feel you understand the author' point but still disagree for some reason.

I'll put the metaphor back to programming. There's programming for quality and programming for financial gain. If your metrics are the latter, then Javascript is the best language. But many people here do think as engineers, and thus there are other qualities that "are not as good" ways to score a language but maximize the ability to deliver a stable product.

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fragmede 8 months ago | parent | prev [-]

In terms of not being a bag of special cases, and thus easy to use, Esperanto is better than English. Like, if you were to design a language from first principles, you'd come up with Esperanto. The only problem is the massive inertia English has, which makes it "better". In terms of design, it's absolute trash. But it's what humanity's got. Trying to learn English as a second or third or fifth language is just so difficult.

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mf_tomb 8 months ago | parent | next [-]

Those special cases are useful or the natural result of speakers coming from other languages. If esperanto were used widely for many years, it would also develop special cases over time. In 200 years, it would be as irregular as english, as it borrowed words and phrases from other languages.

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D-Coder 7 months ago | parent [-]

> If esperanto were used widely for many years, it would also develop special cases over time.

You've never dealt with Esperantists, I can tell.

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mf_tomb 7 months ago | parent [-]

Actually, it's already happening, without being widely used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_vocabulary#Idioms_an...

	▲	em-bee 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		those idioms and slang still follow grammar rules though. they are not irregular. also the irregularities in english developed over centuries by contact with other languages in an environment that lacked the normative influence of globalization and modern communication tools. at the time english was also not the defacto language for international communication that it is today. this status is responsible for efforts such as a wikipedia in basic english that makes information easier to approach by non-native speakers. as esperanto was expressly created with the goal of being an international language, any attempts to introduce irregularities will meet a lot more resistance and therefore development of an irregular grammar is unlikely to happen.

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coldtea 8 months ago | parent | prev [-]

>Like, if you were to design a language from first principles, you'd come up with Esperanto

That's the problem. It's design by commitee instead of evolutionary organic design. It's how cyborgs think people oughta talk.

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jszymborski 8 months ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think maybe they meant it is a better lingua franca than English, which I'm a little more likely to agree with (Esperanto is by no means perfect for this)

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yyuugg 8 months ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Having worked with Lua and JS professionally for years, Lua is far, far worse than JS.

	▲	darknavi 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		I love Lua for game dev, but JS works fine and Typescript is awesome. I loath 1-based indexes though. Just odd.

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prmph 8 months ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For me, one major weakness of English is having adjectives appearing before nouns. The more time passes, the more I hate that aspect of English. It messes up all sorts of things. Most other languages don't have this problem.

Consider that in programming, technical docs, even normal writing, it is almost always better to the most important aspect of a name come first. The adjective-noun order in English makes this awkward all the time.

	▲	umanwizard 7 months ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Most other languages don't have this problem A lot of languages have this property: Germanic languages (incl. English), Slavic languages, Indian languages, most Chinese languages. Source: https://wals.info/feature/87A#7/18.104/263.320 There are strictly _more_ languages with the opposite order (nouns before adjectives), at least in this dataset, but that seems to be an artifact of the huge number of distinct languages with relatively few speakers documented in Southeast Asia, Papua New Guinea and Africa. I suspect that weighted by number of speakers, adjective-noun is the most common order globally.
	▲	kstrauser 7 months ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I love its contribution to wordplay. You can write things like “yesterday we sat down to a meal of golden, moist, roast whisky” because the adjectives lead up to a set of expectations about the subject that turn out to be untrue.
	▲	rightbyte 8 months ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You can go for 'Achilles the swift' order if you want though.

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joshdavham 8 months ago | parent | prev [-]

> Esperanto is certainly not better than English

Agreed. Until Esperanto starts having actual native-speaking communities, I will look at it the same way I look at Klingon or Elvish.

	▲	dogmatism 8 months ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Well, there are denaskuloj, but aside from that, I don't think languages are adopted into communities to replace other languages based on their merits, but based on socio-religious factors that have nothing to do with the language itself
	▲	johnnyanmac 7 months ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>Until Esperanto starts having actual native-speaking communities that was the point of the OOP, yes. No one cares about quality, but popularity. And OOP feels the same.