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Comment by carsongross | Hacker News Reader

Having helped put something out on the internet and hoping (http://gosu-lang.org) I 100% agree, but I think there is something else in there beyond just advocating a language. Let me try to articulate it:

Programming languages don't win because they are better qua programming languages. They win because they solve one problem really well that others do not. Ruby (+ Rails) -> building structured web apps. Javascript -> Being there. C -> Being portable assembler. Java -> C with garbage collection.

Consider the greatest language ever, Lisp (I hate it, but I recognize it's power.) The reason it's never taken off is that there is no one big problem that it solves that other languages can't solve easily enough.

The bad news for a lot of the better, smaller languages out there is that the newer problems are often solved in libraries and momentum (tooling, deployment support, etc.) in the big languages is huge.

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> They win because they solve one problem really well that others do not.

That assertion's got more holes than emmental. Where does Python fit? C#? Javascript and Objective-C don't really "solve one problem really well", they're the only fucking option in their space. Java was not and has never been "C with garbage collection", the syntax is the only thing it got from C.

The language being great at solving a specific use case is definitely a boon and increases its chances (witness PHP or Lua), but it's nowhere near sufficient (Tcl lives in the same niche as Lua — lightweight, extensible, multi-paradigm language for embedding in and scripting of native codebases, predates Lua, and is considered by many of its lovers better than Lua, yet it's dying its slow and protracted death)

> The reason it's never taken off is that there is no one big problem that it solves that other languages can't solve easily enough.

The reasons it never took of is a combination of little advertising/pushing (compare with java), and highly fragmentary communities (the community unit of Lisp, as those of mages, is 1) leading to no corpus of code.

> The bad news for a lot of the better, smaller languages

And yet there's never been more uptake in new languages.

That assertion's got more holes than emmental.

Maybe, but your counterexamples don't seem particularly convincing.

Where does Python fit?

Originally, a readable scripting language.

More recently, a language for back-end web development that doesn't ram OO down your throat.

Also carving out something of a niche as a general purpose scripting language embedded in other applications instead of a custom macro language, like Lua but many more people have prior experience programming in it.

Similar strengths to Java, but with a lot of useful extra features, without most of the limitations that should have gone away a decade ago but didn't, and with a runtime environment that is available by default on Windows.

The reasons [Lisp] never took of is a combination of little advertising/pushing ... and highly fragmentary communities ... leading to no corpus of code.

Also, a highly uniform and generic structure is not always an advantage in a programming language. Sometimes it's better to have things that are different obviously look like they're different.

In short, a language needs advocates that can brag about something, and the brags need to be objectively accurate. Do not claim the adjective "fast" if I can trivially outrun you in Python, or claim "simple" if I can trivially write shorter source code in Java, etc.

It also need to be an interesting thing to brag about, but, honestly, just getting the first bit is enough challenge....

>and the brags need to be objectively accurate

No, it just needs to be convincing. Plenty of convincing lies (or unproven claims) are used to sell programming languages.

cough, cough

The problem with inaccurate bragging is that the loop ends up unclosed; the advocate says "This language is so fast!", the earliest of the early adopters try it and it isn't fast, and so they slag your language on their blog. And in this case, there is a such thing as bad publicity.

Even when I disagree with the propaganda of a language community (lookin' right at you, Node), there is enough truth that it made it through that gauntlet. In that case I'd argue it isn't that they lie about Node, it's that they lie about all the other languages they putatively compare themselves to. Apparently that strategy does work....

I would say that Lisp never took off because when it had its moment to shine, it failed in the speed department. Since then, many languages have since filled the expressiveness niche that Lisp filled.

Of course, that discounts Clojure, which is showing Lisp's power to a new generation, in an environment they can relate to (the JVM).

I agree that languages need to solve a real problem. When I created Obvious Architecture, I actually realized that Ruby is basically the wrong language to do Obvious in, but I did it anyway because it had enough tools to make it kind of work anyway.

Since then, I've been looking for a language that really offers all the bits that would make for a truly compelling Obvious experience without having to write it as a "framework" and it's pretty difficult to find something that really hits all the points well.

I haven't ventured into building my own language yet, but it's awfully tempting.

I think it is worth considering that perhaps obvious architecture is the wrong thing to make, rather than existing languages being wrong for making it.

Have you thought about moving Gosu to using Truffle and Graal for high performance? http://blog.jruby.org/2014/01/truffle_graal_high_performance...

Your own examples contradict your hypothesis. Ruby is a generic scripting language, it is not better or worse than python or perl at anything. Rails made ruby popular due to evangelism, not solving a problem others do not (notice how rails was literally just a crappier django?).

"Being portable assembler" is not solving one problem at all, it is one of the most general things you could cite. That literally is being a better language.

Java took millions of dollars of marketing to make it popular, people didn't just suddenly flock to it because it was C with garbage collection (which was already a solved problem: see C).

Perhaps lisp "never took off" (seems like it took off pretty well to me) because it isn't the greatest language ever? Lisp barely is a language, it is more of a toolkit to build a language with.

> Java took millions of dollars of marketing to make it popular, people didn't just suddenly flock to it because it was C with garbage collection (which was already a solved problem: see C).

Could you please explain what you mean? C is the only language I know in any depth. Beyond a basic description, "garbage collection" is a fairly alien concept to me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boehm_garbage_collector

I was thinking along those lines, cheers.

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