Comment by endorphone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by endorphone | Hacker News Reader

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Some of us have some fatigue about this topic as it has been retrodden literally hundreds of times on here, an army of people stomping their feet and screaming "OMG WHY ARE PEOPLE STILL USING GO!?"

If everyone followed this approach, we would never have ended up with amazing languages like Rust.

This comment reminds me of the top comment in a prior anti-Go spiel (which of course did well on here).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7660924

Is it interesting how little of consequence is written in Rust, or in that example Haskell, and how much is written in Go, C, and even derelict dregs like PHP. The formal perfection of a language does seem to have a great deviance from the likelihood that it serves as a basis for important work.

> Is it interesting how little of consequence is written in Rust, or in that example Haskell, and how much is written in Go, C, and even derelict dregs like PHP. The formal perfection of a language does seem to have a great deviance from the likelihood that it serves as a basis for important work.

That is pretty simple to explain. Well designed languages have a learning curve. They require an initial investment in terms of learning — something that a lot of self styled hackers are not willing to put in. I am sure a ton of stuff is written as shell scripts.

And there is also the matter of how long the language has existed.

I agree with your point, but I'm not sure how it ties in to the comment I was replying to.

Edit: You seem to be overlooking the less tangible contributions languages like Rust or Haskell have made to PLs in general. One example that comes to mind is how Scala has affected the development of Java, even though, in the real world, Scala use is relatively non-existent.

> Is it interesting how little of consequence is written in Rust, or in that example Haskell, and how much is written in Go, C, and even derelict dregs like PHP.

Exactly this. It always amazes me when people respond with "You can't judge a language by the things that are built with it because you can build anything in any Turing complete language". They're pretty much arguing that haskell/rust etc are better than go because all languages are equal.

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