Why people with vastly more skill and experience programming and writing programming languages made the decisions they did.

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mrkeen 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

The only decisions that matter for languages that get adopted are the decisions that cause adoption.

JS went without static types, Go went without generics, PHP was just a tool for reducing html boilerplate. New languages love to stick null right in there. Rust isn't what Graydon Hoare wanted it to be. Chris Lattner called Swift a failure.

It's all up for criticism.

	▲	philosophty 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, there are valid criticisms of anything but without understanding they're unlikely to be useful or correct.

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ameliaquining 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I meant, which particular design decisions are you accusing people of having failed to comprehend the rationale for?

	▲	philosophty 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Whatever design decisions they consider to be weird. Because it probably just means they don't know what the trade offs and goals were.
	▲	5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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henry700 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Skill? Go? With the amount of mistakes piling up over the years comparable to PHP at this point? Really??

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philosophty 5 days ago | parent [-]

These guys have each forgotten 10x than you know about programming.

https://swtch.com/~rsc/

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

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

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

	▲	homebrewer 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Being exceptionally talented programmers does not automatically make them good language designers. I can think of a couple of people who may not be as good at programming, but are light years ahead at designing languages (and maintaining them over long term).
	▲	henry700 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Fair point. The tragedy is that it could’ve been much more. But that was never the goal...