1. Creating something non-trivial in language X, 2. Identifying things that language X made difficult, 3. Brainstorming ways to implement solutions to those issues within a set of acceptable trade-offs, 4. Concluding that some of the brainstormed ideas might actually work, 5. Working really hard to implement and iterate on them.

I can't figure out which step the parent commenter scorns. I guess probably step 2, where they see no pain points to begin with. That's fine, but trying to convince people they haven't felt pain that they have felt is a silly battle. I guess they're actually implying that people who have felt that pain are just not smart enough.

And the worst part of it is, no such language covers all problems effectively; they all have flaws in one way or another... so the next guy comes along thinking he can do it better, and just repeats the mistake of his or her predecessor(s).

Instead of realizing that this would just exacerbate the problem, they go ahead and make it worse.

I guess they're actually implying that people who have felt that pain are just not smart enough.

It is extremely difficult to solve a complex problem in a simple manner. One literally has to be a genius with a lifetime of experience and insights from that experience in order to be able to pull that off, and even then, it doesn't always work and requires multiple iterations, and lots and lots of experimentation. Case in point: Go, still a work in progress by exactly such people. That should be instructive, but it seems that it isn't.

Which is exactly why you don't try to create a language that covers all problems effectively, you define the problems you'd like to speak to. If you have defined those problems in such a way that they are shared by many people, and if you solve those problems in a way that many people find effective, then you may have created a compelling solution. How does that exacerbate "the problem"?

Honestly, what even is "the problem"? Why does it bother you that there are new languages created? The "literal geniuses" from the Bell Labs era experimented a ton, and that was a great thing then, and remains a great thing now. It's always valuable to point people to prior art, but it makes no sense to bemoan research and experimentation.

The problem is that new languages have such fatal flaws, that they make the problems they are trying to solve even worse.

The second, and much more serious problem, is that it takes at least ten years to truly master a programming language. Humans only live about 70 years on the average, which means that it is impossible to keep up with every new language that comes out. I mean I live for this stuff, but I would literally have to be chained to the computer my entire life without time for anything else. That is nonsense.

Anybody who thinks they have mastered a computer language in less than ten years is either a genius, or unbelievably egotistical and arrogant; and knowing a whole bunch of computer languages in a perfunctory manner, enough to make one dangerous leads to a really shitty job of sorting out that mess afterwards... that's the problem. My problem, and likely other people's problem.

What I don't understand about your position is its absolutism. You keep talking about people being egotistical and arrogant, but it seems like you're the only one on this thread being those things, by claiming your subjective opinion as objective fact, and then making ridiculous hyperbolic statements about throwing people in jail based on it. It's not a contradiction for you to personally dislike a language's philosophy and for that language to have been a worthwhile creation and valuable to many people.

Your feelings about different languages are just, like, your opinion man.

Just wait until you invest ten years of your life to master a language, only for everyone else to move on to the next new trend, with you stuck holding the bag.

AngularJS, Rust, and node.js, is it? I can't wait to ask you how you're feeling about all that time you invested into all of those, when all the kids move on to something else and they're no longer popular, for no reason other than the newcomers' ignorance, or because something shinier came along, but didn't actually add any value, just re-implemented the old thing in a worse way.

We can then have a discussion about how you're feeling, having wasted a decade or more of your life away on what will then be perceived irrelevant. That's of course under the (optimistic) assumption that HN is still going to be popular in ten years...

The fathers of C created AWK as C on steriods, and even though they were a success in this endeavor, they were wise enough to create it as a domain specific, and not a general purpose language. If you study their works afterwards, up to Go, they always developed domain specific minilanguages, and always split the difficult problems into many small programs, hence Plan 9. This is very instructive in the context of their previous achievements. They even recommend to solve problems by creating a domain specific minilanguage, but only when this is appropriate to the problem at hand.

Now fast forward to Go. These guys really know what they're doing, and still Go is a research project, unlike Rust, they're not trying to actively sell it to the populace at large, because they know just how difficult it is to create a good systems programming language. So yeah, you bet your patootie I'm angry at anyone who thinks they can do it better. It's not even that they screw it up, that's part of learning and gaining insight, but that they actually actively attempt to sell it as a good solution. Meanwhile, it's even more complicated than the previous solution! And then let's suppose someone invests about a decade to master that new language, such as it is: by that time a pile of other people come along thinking that they know it better and invent their own languages; sometimes they invent a new language just because they think it should have a different syntax, as was the case with Ruby, in the author's own words! Unbelievably arrogant! And now that becomes the new hotness. Congratulations, you just wasted a decade of your life on something that's not in fashion any more. That would be no problem if we lived for 500 to a 1,000 years, or if we were immortal, but we only have this one life, and the length of our life is a blip in the universe. So it turned out to be a huge waste of time. That's the part that really angers me.