He didn't claim it would be, though. He just said, for every feature implemented in a top20 lang, you can already find it implemented somewhere else, 10-20 years ago.
That holds for every mainstream X. It makes the challenge ridiculous.
Here's a challenge: come up with something that people generally think is fundamentally new. Given enough HN commenters, someone will present an example of how something super similar to that thing was already there 20-30 years prior.
It's especially relevant in PL or Databases. DB2 did such foundational work in database theory, and Python 3.6's new dicts finally made some very simple database theory finally available to users.
In PL, there's a massive amount of awesome languages that pretty much existed for the purpose of writing a PhD or doing something funky with semantics. It takes /really really/ long to get into an industrial strength language. Look at Rust for example, it's the first incidence of real Algebraic types for a non-gc language (excluding C++), letting you do wonderful things like https://github.com/lloydmeta/frunk
> That holds for every mainstream X. It makes the challenge ridiculous.
But that was the point... :(
Or put another way, the major languages only include the "middle of the road", conservative features: mostly safe, uncontroversial, and well-specified and tested (it's all "mostly", "approximately" so, there are obvious exceptions). There is a limited supply of such features, which makes all the major languages have non-trivial amounts of overlap in terms of concepts or implementations. Moreover, even if one language implements a truly unique feature, it gets copied the next day (to where it makes sense), leading to even more similarity between languages.
The other part of what I'm saying is that if you research and learn as many unpopular languages as you can today - right now - you'll be covered (in terms of having to learn new features in your job's PL) for at least the next decade without any additional effort.
I thought that was exactly the point klibertp was making. The paragraph starts like this:
> Because there is very, very little unique features to each language. Unless you go to the fringes, you're bound to see the same concepts applied again and again and again
