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by alexandercrohde·10y ago·view on hn ↗
Reading between the lines, the author actually feels this: "Stop making a new language every month. The ones we have are good enough, and it fractures inter-developer cooperation when we don't know the same languages, rebuild all the same libraries over and over for different languages."

Which is one valid viewpoint. But he couches it in the socratic method against a strawman (presumably himself) which ultimately leaves the reader feeling dirty.

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The problem of handling an environment with richly diverse hardware and languages is itself an interesting problem, and probably much more analogous and appropriate to the problems of meaning human society.

So if someone were saying to me "stop developing new languages and environments; it makes things hard", it'd be like saying "stop developing new culture or human relationships, because life is easier when we're all bland and homogenous." I find it a little bit offensive and at least a failure to recognize the important problems (due to obsession over the easy ones.)

Well, that's one analogy. How about this analogy, what would you say to me if I said "Hey I invented a new spoken language, it's more efficient than English?" And what if I did this in a climate where dozens of people independently were already doing this too?

So, to simplify, I think the reason a lot of developers roll their eyes at another new language is because the problems the languages are solving are less important than the fracturing they make in the engineering community.

If you think a language is missing something, why not contribute to the language with an RFC. C++, Java, and PHP have all been advancing significantly over the years. Or why don't you get together with 100 other language-makers and come up with a unified solution?

I would say "It's wonderful that your human brain is capable of learning and designing such a language."

The problem is still in understanding what the words mean. It's easier if you have standard languages that everyone speaks, but if you want to have computers do amazing things, they'll have to be able to handle that problem, regardless of how many languages exist.

And it would be wonderful if computers could learn to understand languages regardless of who designed them and why. That problem isn't going to be solved by running away from it.