Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

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There are a lot of "ideal" languages out there that are overwhelmingly under used - haskell, erlang, etc.

Meanwhile, Javascript and Python are eating everyone's lunches. .NET and Swift are doing pretty well too, but JS in particular is derided as a "bad" language with tons of problems, yet it's bursting at the seams with developers. How can this be so?

Frankly, it's because you can take a random person off the street and turn them into a decent JS developer in like two weeks. JS may be formally inconsistent, but it's seems easy enough for most people to get it. It's quick to see and get results, so new developers don't get discouraged.

If Perl wants to be popular, it needs to attract users on how easy it is. This was one of the shifts Python has made over the years (getting easier for new users) and it continues to grow its userbase.

JavaScript got popular because it was the only option for scripting in browser. Newbs constantly trip over its hazardous wires lying all over the floor. It's absurdly daunting, especially once you bring in all the modern libraries full of their own baggage.

What you say is true for Python though.

Plus many people fall in love with their first language, which is very often JavaScript. In an earlier era this seemed to happen quite a bit with Pascal, likely because it was a common teaching language.

Guess this is a perk of QBasic being my first language. It's so dead and forgotten and I haven't touched it in 20 years that I just don't care about it. That, and once I learned C, I felt like a real programmer, so there wasn't any reason to go back.

I still get misty when I think about how easy it was to use QBasic and it's IDE to throw stuff together and get graphics and sound going. I moved on to C++ and Java, and the overhead of trying to take that next step was steep.

In QBasic, if you wanted to draw a circle, you wrote SCREEN 1; CIRCLE (100,100), 10 and then hit F5.

Trying to do the same thing in C++ had me poring through offline Win32 API .chms for days to understand event loops, windowing, brushes, bitmaps, and memory management, then fighting with linkers and header paths to get it to actually compile.

I still remember making very simple RPGs in QBasic in full pixelated glory. For getting a bunch of kids into programming, it was a great language.

I learn computer programming with basic, then Pascal, but only felt in love with python.

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