Comment by mamcx
3 days ago
> I wonder, at which point it is worth it to make a language?
AT ANY POINT.
No exist, nothing, that could yield more improvements that a new language. Is the ONLY way to make a paradigm(shift) stick. Is the ONLY way to turn "discipline" into "normal work".
Example:
"Everyone knows that is hard to mutate things":
* Option 1: DISCIPLINE
* Option 2: you have "let" and you have "var" (or equivalent) and remove MILLIONS of times where somebody somewhere must think "this var mutates or not?".
"Manually manage memory is hard"
* Option 1: DISCIPLINE
* Option 2: Not need, for TRILLONS of objects across ALL the codebases with any form of automatic memory management, across ALL the developers and ALL their apps to very close to 100% to never worry about it
* Option 3: And now I can be sure about do this with more safety and across threads and such
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Make actual progress with a language is hard, because there is a fractal of competing things that in sore need of improvement, and a big subset of users are anti-progress and prefer to suffer decades of C (example) than some gradual progress with something like pascal (where a "string" exist).
Plus, a language need to coordinate syntax (important) with std library (important) with how frameworks will end (important) with compile-time AND runtime outcomes (important) with tooling (important).
And miss dearly any of this and you blew it.
But, there is not other kind of project (apart from a OS, FileSystem, DBs) where the potential positive impact will extend to the future as much.
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