Re:Near Future of Programming Languages [pdf]
by lhnz on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @04:45AM
(#15591770)
People aren't choosing between those languages based on performance or avoiding any due to missing features. I've never heard of anybody doing that.
People generally choose languages due to assumptions about their hiring pool.
Re:Near Future of Programming Languages [pdf]
by marcosdumay on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @10:00AM
(#15593257)
If people only choose languages based on popularity, how do you imagine any language ever becomes popular?
Re:Near Future of Programming Languages [pdf]
by lhnz on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @10:55AM
(#15593659)
My point is that those transpiled languages aren't that stymied. You can use them without a lot of problems, and they're being left on the bench for reasons other than their feature set.
Companies generally choose JavaScript because there are lots of developers to choose from, it runs everywhere and the ecosystem is huge.
Engineers choose something like PureScript as it's not a 'blub' language and people think that by choosing it they will be able to hire (or be seen as) "math geniuses". I'm sure the feature set is important, but it's not enough to unseat a language with the previously described properties.
No, it isn't inertia -- one important reason is that creating a transpiler to JS invariably ends up with a crippled (feature-restricted), slower version of the original language (Clojure, etc.)
Thus the hope placed in Webassembly.