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Comment by eksemplar | Hacker News Reader

C++ had a purpose though, to create object oriented C. A lot of these modern languages seem to be mainly made because someone could.

With so many there is also a very low chance of any of them actually picking up because the useless ones drown out the C++es.

I think people should do what they want though. If you want to make a programming language you should, just don’t expect everyone to view your endeavors as useful.

As far as your fifth point goes, new languages aren’t a good way to influence programming in general. Stuff like lambdas weren’t born in some hipster language, they came from JavaScript. Because if you want to influence, you have to make sure people actually see your stuff.

That being said. Making a PL language is a much better use of your time than whining on HN.

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> Stuff like lambdas weren’t born in some hipster language, they came from JavaScript.

They did not come from JS. JS took them from Scheme. Scheme took them from ... lambda calculus? Anyways, not knocking on JS, but they did not invent lambdas by any stretch of the imagination. I do agree with the rest of your comment btw.

I didn’t mean to imply that JS invented it, I meant to imply JS made them popular to the masses.

>Stuff like lambdas weren’t born in some hipster language, they came from JavaScript.

Lambdas predate JavaScript by decades. Basically according to your reasoning JS shouldn't exist. It was created by Netscape to compete in the web browser market with Microsoft script language the moment you had Python, Ruby, Pike etc. There were no afaik novel concepts to be found in JS.

Before JavaScript embraces lambdas, everyone thought they were a bad idea. You could say something similar about jit.

I know JS gets a lot of hate on hn, but if you look at the history of a lot of modern pl paradigms, many of them got traction after years of ridicule because JavaScript brought them to the masses.

Everyone that never put their foot into a CS degree.

Even Clipper had support for closures.

Python had lambda in 1994. JS didn’t even exist then.

Face it - people use JS because the browser happened, not because it’s original in any meaningful way.

JS didn’t invent lambdas, it made them popular. Or is it just a coincidence that every major language that didn’t have them, adopted them after they got real use in JS?

>"Stuff like lambdas weren’t born in some hipster language, they came from JavaScript"

Lambdas are actually so hipster that they were cool before we even had programming languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus

As far as I know, Lisp was the first language to actually implement the idea. I actually struggle to think of any language concepts that were introduced by Javascript.

I also tend to disagree with the overall sentiment that new languages aren't a good way to influence programming. Haskell, for example, is quite a departure from a language like C. I don't think we would've ended up with the great, proven options we have today if everything was just incremental changes on some base. Sometimes you need to rethink things from scratch. It's part of the reason we don't have one language that fits perfectly for all problem sets.

C++ initial purpose was for Bjarne never to write plain C code, after his experience rewriting his nice Simula code into BCPL, he swore never to use such low level languages again.

There are plenty of interviews where he tells how C with Classes came to be.

Many of those new languages are created because C++ failed to improve C in the areas that really matter:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7724

Actually it improved, what C++ compilers cannot prevent is for people to write C code with a C++ compiler, beyond outlawing it as bad practice.

Copy-paste compatibility with C is a burden on modern computing, but it was also what contributed to C++'s adoption during the early 90's.

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