Now there's 40. Each one needs it's own networking library. 8 different kinds of databases - with each language needing it's own adapter. 5 different web frameworks for each one. 3 different json libaries.
It's a classic cartesian product. And instead of "I'll help fill in the gaps", its "I'll solve the problem by writing a new language!" -- which just makes the cartesian product bigger.
I personally wouldn't want to live in a world in which I could only use "one of these 5 languages", whatever those are. But I would love to live in a world where things weren't so deep in abstraction and complexity. These are two very different problems.
One aspect is that it would make an interesting situation at the borders between states. And that's kinda sorta what we have now with programming languages.
> Stuff on top of stuff on top of stuff.
Couldn't that also be too many choices? Like if you specialize in JS instead of C, you're not going to have all the knowledge a C expert might know. Instead of utilizing proven, existing C libraries, you're going to write stuff from scratch in JS?
If everyone uses the "proven" libraries and languages and whatever we'll have no innovation. I don't want to live in a rigid world where we somehow ended up choosing a set of things and nobody uses anything else; I want to see more software written in weird languages. Arguments that go like "but nobody is gonna learn a whole language to contribute to your stuff" are depressing - if it's good, I, like many others, would. Without experiments like these we'd still be in the 60s using COBOL because it's "industry proven" or "battle tested" or "blazingly fast" or whatever. That world is boring.
This is Hacker News after all.
What absolutely shatters us is that we almost never have enduring & exposed bases. Software is endless layers of abstraction reaching upwards. Very few layers expose themselves at all. So we are all strangers to most software.
For software to be simple elegant & minimal, we would have to be able to deploy existing knowledge, be able to leverage the fundamentals we know. But that's not where we are, but we are all adrift:
> In the past year I think I have finally come to understand the ideals of Unix: file descriptors and processes orchestrated with C. It's a beautiful idea. This is not however what we interact with.