I have a theory that they've actually succeeded with the latter too. I mean, look at Java now, and look how many mini-Javas (all those JIT-compiled languages and their runtimes) have emerged since. The point of Java was to unify, we've got more division than ever instead.

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anonymous908213 18 hours ago | parent [-]

The point of Java was write-once, run everywhere, and that is perfectly viable these days. I don't want to live in a world where everyone is a Java programmer, and I don't think there is really any reason to suppose that unifying on a single programming language would be desirable for developers. IMO, Javascript already shows the dangers of over-unification; you get an ecosystem so full of packages that a significant portion of the language's developers are only capable of developing by stacking 1000 packages on top of each other, with no ability to write their own code and accordingly no ability to optimize or secure their programs according to the bespoke needs of the project rather than using general purpose off-the-shelf libraries.

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m132 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I can quickly think of problems we have to deal with trying to make a real cross-platform application, or worse, a cross-language interface to a system/library, but not many that would stem from having a single dominant (non-stagnant or proprietary) language.

The overuse of dependencies is a problem, sure, but it's completely unrelated to "over-unification". Every ecosystem with a built-in package manager suffers from this, be it Node.js, Python, or Rust, to name a few. In fact, it's not even the package manager, it's the ease in adding new dependencies. Go demonstrates that pretty well.

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bigstrat2003 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> a significant portion of the language's developers are only capable of developing by stacking 1000 packages on top of each other, with no ability to write their own code

That's because those devs are incompetent, not because there are a ton of packages.

	▲	anonymous908213 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I believe one enables the other. If the package ecosystem wasn't oversaturated to the degree it is, they wouldn't be able to masquerade as developers and publish anything. But because there is a Javascript component for everything, they can do enough of an impression of a developer to ship things and get hired without ever learning how to actually program.