I constantly feel like inferior languages are picked up, while superior languages are discarded. It's almost as if the universe had a law: "inferior technology is always preferred no matter how hard you seethe".

Examples:

  * Python preferred over Ruby
  * TypeScript preferred over Dart or even JavaScript (which is fine and, as a bonus, doesn't require compilation step like TS)
  * Go is preferred over Crystal and D.

Dart is much worse than TypeScript. The over-reliance on codegen for the most simple things (e.g. https://pub.dev/packages/freezed#primary-constructors), the lack of expressiveness of the type system (it only got sum types very recently), and a lot of other little annoyances are ever present when having to write Dart.

Languages do not matter as much as you think. Ecosystems are everything. Twice in my life I started companies (the first one took all my life savings) and in both cases the right call was what you called an "inferior language".

I actually liked D very much, and WB had been a personal hero of mine when I was in college. But I am not betting my career on an ecosystem built around by a single brilliant guy. For high-stakes projects, a wise decision is building on a platform with several deep-pocketed backers.

And for toy/personal projects... do you even need a language anymore? Just ask your favorite LLM to generate you an executable which does what you want (partially joking here).

What pains me in Python adoption, beyond its use as Perl replacement, is that we have so much better dynamic languages with advanced JIT implementations, but have to reach out writing extensions in native languages instead.

At least Python as DSL for GPU JIT compilers is a thing now.

Yes, I know about PyPy in the corner looking for attention.

The superior languages on your list just reflect your personal preferences. There are not perfect languages, just appropriate languages for given application.

It's quite subjective what you consider to be better. Is Ruby better than Python? Maybe so, but Ruby only ever had one killer app that is Rails while Python has a vast ecosystem. Is Crystal better than Go? Maybe so, but Go ist just so much more mature (plus the ecosystem argument).

> Python preferred over Ruby

Python's syntax is closer to written human language, and it uses more obvious words.

> TypeScript preferred over Dart or even JavaScript

Typescript is a strict superset of JavaScript.

> Go is preferred over Crystal and D

Go is backed by a big Corp

Regarding ruby and python I thought the 2 were in the same league, esp compared to perl. Over 20 years ago I evaluated both and went ruby because of the more consistent api and of course pythons forced whitespace is an easy tie breaker against it. At this point I'm not to pleased that many younger programmers that python as some sort of default and tend to end up writing far too fancy code in it when it ends up being the wrong tool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

It's scary to not have type checks in JavaScript. I do them by eyeballing the code, but ugh.

Also all languages you mentioned support complex code and OOP.

speaking of typescript and dart, the language i was really rooting for in that niche was haxe. wish it had gotten more mainstream.

> Python preferred over Ruby

... Perhaps what you're describing is having a niche opinion. If you had some opinions, like a preference for "Everything must be done in as many ways as possible with funky characters" or "I hate indentation", it would certainly seem that the world is against you. But, perhaps, you just really smart and can remember the intention of all the complicated code you wrote a year ago, so you don't even need to write comments, and thats great. However, being special does not mean that some technolgoy is objectively inferior, unless you can actually come up with a provably objective metric.

Overall, the technology that is there, solving most of the problems for most of the cases is the technology that is superior, by the law of the universe, not the other way around.

I don't agree with any of your examples, but I have my own, like Pascal is a better language than C, by many metrics. I can also accept that C, is what people who invented unix, also invented. And that makes Pascal inferior to C, now, as choice for any project that requires that you hire embedded software developers. That's what the universe decided.

> The Go argument that it's popular because it's simpler is absurd in the sense that no one really forces you to write complex code and use classes or other advanced OOP features in D.

The same argument applies to C++. No one is forcing you to create complex nested templates or other difficult features.

Yet many criticisms to the language are in the form: "But it is possible to write very complex code that no one understands!"

It is absurd.

On what planet is JS better than TS. You ever work with JS?

Having coffee almost 30 years in c++ I really good tired of the complexity of it. Some of the newer complexity being workarounds for (in retrospect) poor decisions made decades ago. Build system situation never helped, and I still despise cmake. When D came out I was interested but garbage collection immediately turned me off, in my opinion the boost shared pointers (later adopted into the standard) solved and shut the door on memory leaks as a serious issue.

And then the d2 fiasco sort of blew it all up. Doesn't help that the language always felt very heavy to me. Likewise Rust feels heavy and cumbersome itself.

So it ends up that I'm another one of those who feels the itch getting scratched by zig.