

What Languages Fix - jey
http://paulgraham.com/fix.html

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henning
Haskell: there are too many experimental pure lazy functional languages.

Scala: why should you have to choose between functional and object-oriented
programming?

F#: OCaml has no libraries.

Erlang: C doesn't scale.

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Zak
Arc: Common Lisp is a kludge, and Scheme has no libraries.

This seems to address the reasons the languages were created more than the
reasons people continue to use them today. The former is insightful, but the
latter might be more useful.

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rsheridan6
>...and Scheme has no libraries.

That's a strange reason to write a brand-new language that has even fewer
libraries. If that's the problem with Scheme. I hope PG and JAR had better
reasons than that.

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gms
jar is working on Arc?

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rsheridan6
No, but jar was involved with T, which had the same reason according to pg.

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tel
This is interesting because it's a good way to look at the domain of language
not in its power or application but its audience.

Haskell: Because programming isn't enough like math

Mozart: Because Prolog is pretty foreign

Lisp: Because parens are really underappreciated ; )

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jey
My favorite is "Lisp: Turing Machines are an awkward way to describe
computation", especially given that McCarthy originally only intended Lisp to
be used as a theoretical device, and not for actual programming! (so goes the
story, anyway)

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michaelneale
I wonder if that is true or a myth? I wouldn't be surprised if it was true.

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vlad
Perl: C isn't as good with text.

PHP: I'd rather write my own Perl.

Visual Basic: Crap, we desperately need a way to inflate the number of apps
available for Windows.

The same is true for most companies.

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aston
PHP: Doesn't [insert other language] have that function? Let's add it, too!

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mojuba
Original JavaScript: HTML can't validate forms

Modern JavaScript: we are the best language committee in the world

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ralph
Perl wasn't the motivation behind creating Python.

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rkabir
will there ever be one language to rule them all?

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tokipin
maybe Arc 2...

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eru
Hopefully the version digits of Arc will converge to e.

