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Comment by jleyank | Hacker News Reader

There are a number of good, general purpose languages. What we seem to have less of is good, general purpose developers and good, general purpose and stable libraries. I have always been frustrated having to debug my tools as well as my project, and I would think others feel the same. Let’s try to stop inventing new wheels and refine those we already have.

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No, there aren't very many good programming languages, not very old ones anyway.

Imagine everyone was happy with C/C++, we wouldn't have Rust or Nim. Imagine everyone was happy with Java and JavaScript, we wouldn't have Dart or Go.

The most used programming languages today are JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP and C++, all of which are shit-tier. We definitely need more languages, not less.

If we have good languages, the ecosystems will develop around it... it may take 20 years... but I think it would be so much nicer to see a new much better language have a great stable libraries in 20 years... than people still having to deal with shit-tier languages like python and Java in 20 years.

Idk, Java and JavaScript (as TypeScript) aren’t actually that bad. Yeah Java loves OOP and verbose design patterns, but it’s gotten a lot better with functional programming, syntax sugar, and IDE support making it much less verbose. JavaScript has some weird quirks but with strict TypeScript, a good linter, and ES2020+ features, you can “almost” avoid them.

Python and PHP are fine if you’re only using them in small projects. I agree though, if you have a decently large or performant project, or one that may scale, you should pick a different language. And C++ is just terrible and should be deprecated/replaced by Go and Rust.

Having closures doesn't make functional programming. One important aspect, which Java lacks, is values being immutable by default.

Not so fast. JavaScript/C++/Python/Java are world class Champions. Having out-competed and destroyed literally thousands of competing languages. They are the battle hardened, scared veterans of years of battles. And they are still standing strong in the middle of a field of language corpses, taking on all competitors. Don’t assume that you know what it takes for a language to be a winner. Especially if you think the Champion languages that have survived 20+ years of fierce hard battle are “shitty”.

Stop making languages, start making interactive debuggers, standard libraries ("batteries includes"), autocompletors (LSP support as good as rust-analyzer), dynamic syntax highlighters, linters, autoformatters, visualizers.

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