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A comment on Nil in Go is typed in theory and sort of untyped in practice. Parent comment

Re:Nil in Go is typed in theory and sort of untyped in practice by 13415 on Wednesday March 31, 2021 @02:13PM (#26650876)
It's pointless discussing this. There is no perfect language and every programming language I've ever seen has design problems at one level or another. I know enough of CL, Pascal, Modula, Ada, Rust, Nim, etc., to know their weaknesses, too.

Your C example is also not convincing. Lisp and Algol were already strong contenders at the time. People chose C because they needed a fast and close to metal language to create their own operating system for mainframes. It was a hack just like your category 2. Still, it's a great language.

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Re:Nil in Go is typed in theory and sort of untyped in practice by brundolf on Wednesday March 31, 2021 @02:22PM (#26650997)
> There is no perfect language

> It's pointless discussing this

I don't see how the first implies the second. This is a programming forum; it's good to discuss and debate the specifics of these things.

C may not have been the best example of the category, but I think the category stands. Rust for example, much as I love it, is exploring uncharted territory. I wouldn't be surprised if 10 years from now we have ownership-based languages that are much easier to use, simply because lessons will have been learned by that point. Arguably Java's OOP fundamentals are not as good as C#'s because Java had to explore that territory first (setting aside technicalities about what the term "OOP" really means). Etc.

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Re:Nil in Go is typed in theory and sort of untyped in practice by 13415 on Wednesday March 31, 2021 @03:21PM (#26651804)
The problem is that decades of experience has shown that only few programmers can discuss the advantages and disadvantages of programming languages for certain purposes in a halfway objective manner, and since few of them implement their own languages even the good discussions often remain fruitless.

I'll recommend Reddit's r/ProgrammingLanguages, as well as Scott's Programming Language Pragmatics as a reading instead. It's not fully up-to-date but I found the comparisons of features and their trade-offs in it fascinating.

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