Comment by paganel
18 days ago
> How did toy languages start getting used for serious work?
Because those "toy" languages delivered the goods, while the "serious" ones fumbled their way big time. It was very funny seeing how lambda-the-ultimate.org forum was a Drupal installation (meaning both PHP and said Drupal).
So they just got there first?
Not an impressive feat then. We all had to make do with shoddy stuff just to get a project done (and I am not talking only in programming but also in meat-space). But to then hold on to it with a death grip, yeah, these people I don't respect.
Nobody is stoping anyone on putting a quick project up-and-running using Rust, let's say. But good luck finding people to maintain it in the long run. And good luck finding the "batteries included" stuff. And good luck on many other things. We're all building bazaars, not cathedrals, and that's ok, even though we oftentimes seem to forget that.
True, nobody is stopping anyone and that's why I am gradually moving my stuff from bash/zsh to Golang and might even further migrate it to Rust in the near future -- LLMs make these things almost trivial and my only hurdle was how verbose can Rust feel for a basic CLI app. That hurdle no longer exists.
But don't look at me, I never liked Perl, PHP, Ruby. They were, and still are, hacks. I was aiming at people who just accept the status quo and shrug.