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Re:A Programming Language Underdog by marcosdumay on Saturday September 22, 2018 @01:25PM (#18046887)
You know, I'll have to add to the disagreement. Because of all the technical reasons yeah, your way would stop language development, but also because herding cats is a really counterproductive thing to do, every time somebody powerful enough to get a chance tries it, everybody loses in the end. (But you are free to keep thinking this way. Of course, I won't change to your preferred set, but if you want to reduce fragmentation, you are free to surrender your preferences.)

Anyway, perftools are only a must have when performance becomes a problem, step through debuggers are way overrated, there are many features that no amount of libraries or tools will give you, and ecosystems quality matter about as much as size.

Re:A Programming Language Underdog by sparkie on Saturday September 22, 2018 @02:06PM (#18047137)
Realistically, what features can be provided by the language but not by libraries? If there are many cases, would that not indicate that the language's expressiveness is lacking?

IMO, the goal of languages isn't to provide many features, but to provide constraints, so that programmers can stick to a set of rules that their peers can understand and agree upon. The most powerful language is the machine code for whatever CPU you're using, because there are no constraints, you have all of the power of the processor.