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(joke in the title stolen from a redditor)
Context: some Rust kid vandalized cppreference.com today.
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this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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An attitude I've seen a lot among software developers is that basically there aren't "good languages" and "bad languages." That all languages are equal and all criticisms of particular languages and all opinions that some particular language is "bad" are invalid.
I couldn't disagree more.
The syntax, tooling, standard library, third-party libraries, documentation quality, language maintainers' policies, etc are of course factors that can be considered when evaluating how "good" a language is. But definitely one of the biggest factors that should be considered is how assholeish the community around a particular language is.
A decade or two ago, Ruby developers had a reputation for being smug and assholeish. I can't say I knew a statistically significant number of Ruby developers, but the ones I did know definitely embodied that stereotype. I've heard recently that the Rust community has similar issues.
The Rust language has some interesting features that have made me want to look deeper, but what I've heard about the community around Rust has so far kept me away.
I write Java for a paycheck, but for my side projects, Go is my (no pun intended) go-to language. I've heard nothing but good things about its community. I think I'll stick with it for a while.
Pretty sure syntax is the only one that is even related to what a language is. All the rest are just ecosystem development primarily effected by popularity.
And the ecosystem affects whether when I run into an obstacle, I can google for 5 minutes to find the solution or whether I'll spend the next three days trying dozens of incorrect approaches suggested by StackOverflow answers and random comments on language-specific forums and Wordpress blog posts etc. Whether you consider "the ecosystem" part of the language or not, it's worth considering when choosing a language to work in.
Sure but, this isn't about the actual language. For instance I like Ada, there isn't a lot of public support for it and you're mostly left with the RM and GNAT manuals. But none of this is relevant to Ada as a language. Which was really all I was saying, you should probably split complaints about the ecosystem and the actual language affecting viability.
Of course it's relevant to (my or anyone else's use of) Ada as a language. And for any language the language and culture influence each other too much to consider them entirely separate. The attitude of the community invariably ends up being reflected in the syntax and standard library (and third party tools/libraries/documentation) of the language and vice versa. If you want in your head to decide there's a distinction there, I guess that's fine, but such a distinction has no practical benefit to a developer making the decision what language to use for such-and-such use-case.