Comment by davidw
3 months ago
Thanks - this was one of the more interesting things I've read here in a while.
I wonder if "Programming languages seem to have somewhat stagnated to me.", a sentiment I share, is just me paying less attention to them or a real thing.
I think there is innovation, but there's more than innovation required to be a good language. If a innovative feature is the cornerstone of a language, it frequently means that the language neglects pragmatic coding features that while not particularly special contribute to the language being nice to use.
I feel like in the next few years in languages will be things like Rust descendants where people with experience in using Rust want to keep what works for them but scales back some of the rigidity in favour of pragmatism.
It's also with noting that there are existing languages that are also changing over time. Freepascal has developed a lot of features over the years that make it fairly distant from original Pascal. More recent languages like Haxe are still developing into their final form. TypeScript has gone from a language that provided a tangible solution to an existing problem to a quagmire of features that I'd rather not have.