Such a beautiful, elegant language. Simple to grasp and lets the compiler handle all that legitimate complexity.
Wish more language designers would respect code authors like these designers do.
Wish more language designers would respect code authors like these designers do.
By contrast, with a community language where these decisions are made in public, by committee, and perhaps by a team of volunteers, it seems like things are always just a bit more strained. I'm sure some of the more famous PEPs took a huge personal toll on GvR, and there's no doubt that they caused a lot of high emotions. I see similarly troublesome patterns in Nim and Scala, where it would seem that "trying to avoid too much conflict with people who are forcefully communicating strongly held opinions over a medium like the Internet where it's difficult to modulate emotions" can be a real factor in the decision of what language features to include and how. And, in that kind of environment, it's probably particularly difficult to keep the Internet, with all its . . . Internetiness, at bay for long enough to really make sure you've got all the details dialed in right. Much easier, I imagine, to go for the punt and get the whole business over with.
F# for example is set loose of these constraints.
It's all of our good fortune that it's in YC's interests to fund HN just as it is, with the moderators' primary job being to keep it interesting and hopefully keep the community happy. If HN were a startup, we would have to play the growth-hacking game. If it were the media property of some larger corporation, some manager would eventually put a monetization squeeze on it. Either of those tactics would ruin this place, whether or not they succeeded.
YC doesn't need us to do such things because a happy HN is the most valuable-to-YC HN. It's basically an accident—a dual accident of how YC's business works and how things historically developed—that we ended up in that spot. It's a special position to be in, and our first responsibility is to preserve it. Hence our motto, Move slowly and preserve things.