Re:Go generics are not bad
by munificent on Saturday July 09, 2022 @01:11AM
(#32031947)
Both industry and academia are making languages according to their own incentives and criteria.
Industry language designers are trying to make their users more productive enough to justify the cost to design and build the language. An industry language that doesn't have enough users and doesn't make those users' lives better enough to offset the salaries of the language team is a losing proposition and a bad language.
Academics are trying to publish papers on novel ideas. A language that cured cancer would be considered a bad language if someone had already designed a language that cured cancer the prior year.
These incentive structures a somewhat opposed: the easiest way to make a language easier to adopt is to make it more familiar and less novel. But they are somewhat aligned as well. A language with no new ideas can't be any better than the languages before it.
So there is a natural diffusion process where academia explores the frontier of weird language ideas. Many don't pan out. All of them are weird and unapproachable when they first appear. The ideas worth keeping stick around. Eventually an industry language will add a dollop of those novel ideas and surround them with a familiar framework so that users can actually absorb and use the thing.
Industry language designers are trying to make their users more productive enough to justify the cost to design and build the language. An industry language that doesn't have enough users and doesn't make those users' lives better enough to offset the salaries of the language team is a losing proposition and a bad language.
Academics are trying to publish papers on novel ideas. A language that cured cancer would be considered a bad language if someone had already designed a language that cured cancer the prior year.
These incentive structures a somewhat opposed: the easiest way to make a language easier to adopt is to make it more familiar and less novel. But they are somewhat aligned as well. A language with no new ideas can't be any better than the languages before it.
So there is a natural diffusion process where academia explores the frontier of weird language ideas. Many don't pan out. All of them are weird and unapproachable when they first appear. The ideas worth keeping stick around. Eventually an industry language will add a dollop of those novel ideas and surround them with a familiar framework so that users can actually absorb and use the thing.