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Comment by G4BB3R | Hacker News Reader

I prefer to use languages in the domains they were designed for, and I think it's almost impossible to a general purpose language, or a system programming language, to be better in a domain-specific language that was designed with the right trade offs in mind. Elm having less abstraction-power and doesn't offering full interop with JS, was a design decision. For this reason, we have lots of high quality packages that makes sense to Elm, instead of bindings of JS libs. For the other side, I can't see any language being better at system programming than Rust.

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> “ I prefer to use languages in the domains they were designed for”

So for web development, do you use PHP?

Because neither Python, nor Ruby nor even JavaScript itself was designed for web development.

JavaScript was definitely designed for web development. Though, at the time web development meant a tiny bit of magic in an otherwise static html document.

I wouldn’t call “animating a piece of text” on a HTML page as “web development.

16 bit home computers could do this better 10 years before JS.

The crucial distinguishing factor is that JS was made to animate a bit of text... on every device in existence, past present or future. That's the biggest difference between the web and native.

The "every device in existence" fails with node, at example, which has a different standard library, and every browser support libraries and even syntax differently (which is why we backport stuff with tools like babel)

I can only guess but, I think the parent means web development in the context of an HTTP server. (GET/POST/etc).

Most of Ruby's life has been dedicated to web development.

The original use-case at birth of a language matters less, as programming languages are living things that evolve and mature, sometimes morphing into very different things than they were at the beginning.

Likewise Rust's current lifespan has almost entirely been dedicated to taking on C/C++ and their use-cases in systems programming and server applications. That's all that really matters here.

No, because PHP was not designed at all, it was just a hack that solved some problems and started to evolve. Anyway, web development in '95 is not the same thing as today.

Your statement would pretty much also be true if you substituted Javascript for PHP.

Language design does not end with the release of the first version.

> nor even JavaScript itself was designed for web development

Javascript was designed for web development of the 90s. It evolved along with web development.

> I can't see any language being better at system programming than Rust.

Ada/SPARK, but it won't get a standing ovation from current generation of devs adopting Rust.

Luckily it gets some headlines exposure via NVidia and Genode OS adoption.

I actually see Ada/SPARK referenced pretty frequently in discussion with other Rust programmers, and I've been to at least one Rust talk in which learning from Ada was the main topic.

Anyway, it's hard to blame people for looking elsewhere when the best Ada compilers were proprietary for so long.

I not so much, beyond some occasional assertions of Rust being responsible for features that Ada already had them first.

As for compilers being expensive, while true, I learned Ada via books a couple of years before being able to put my hands on a compiler.

Then again, maybe that is no longer fashionable way of learning.

Ada seems very nice, but compared to rust I think it lacks momentum and (some) ergonomics. It's sad, but a C-like syntax on top of the Ada semantics would possibly be more popular.

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