

Small and Fast - jimbokun
http://jimbokun.github.com/programming%20languages/2012/09/23/small-and-fast/

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LBarret
You consider speed and size but practical evidence seems to imply that
extensbility and readability are as much important, see python, ruby, etc.

Those affect the design of the language. The simplicity of the
interpreter/compiler is also very important to build a community of code dev.

A PL is an ecosystem, the implementation is the core but there are so many
other important things...

~~~
jimbokun
I linked to a Paul Graham essay where he
[argues](<http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html>) succinctness is strongly
correlated with reliability.

Agreed that simplicity is an underrated feature of programming languages (Rich
Hickey had some very interesting things to say about this). That's kind of
hinted at in my article with Yaron Minsky praising the consistency of OCaml
performance, compared to the difficulty people have predicting Haskell
performance.

And agreed that the most important aspect of a programming language is the
quality of the culture built around it. I wonder, do the characteristics of
the language determine the culture, or are they largely orthogonal?

