Comment by lucozade | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucozade | Hacker News Reader

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Languages: Swift, Go, Rust, Julia, Haskell, JS, C++ etc etc

Dev envs: VSCode, Electron, more build systems than you can shake a stick at, VMs, containers, playgrounds etc

Non-textual programming. For general purpose programming, I can't think of any. There are some dead ends that will probably remain so. For niche programming, there are loads.

And to my point, Lisp, Smalltalk and Plan 9 are all good examples of failed experiments that folk took ideas from and used in subsequent projects.

Now, you may not like the investment and innovation. It may not be what you had in mind. Each to their own. But there's plenty of investment and no small amount of innovation.

No, it's not about personal preference. It is about what is (im)possible when the only context to be considered is the status quo. The technologies you list are innovative but in the end just iterations of inventions of the 1970s. The 70s were so special because stuff happened there was the result of increased spending into science and research of the 60s after the Sputnik crisis [1]. Today's R&D is not focused on what could be possible in 10, 20, or 30 years but in 1, 2, or 3 quarters since companies funding the research need to be focused on their bottom line. The Eve project was special insofar in that it received funding not tied to short-term goals – but only to an amount that in the end wasn't enough. Similar things happened elsewhere and this bars the way to more meaningful inventions [2].

[1] The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal. Mitchell Waldrop.

[2] Founder School Session: The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o

labview is a general purpose visual programming language. it's as general purpose as, say, python. it's just different and proprietary.

That's fair. Same can be said for some of the educational tools too.

More of a cul de sac than a dead end.

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