Ask HN: What's with all the new languages?

Languages get popular because of the people who use them. PHP ruled because it was easy to use and had a ton of tutorials - with a huge userbase to answer any question.

I'm not sure why people knock C++, its ugly but its fast. Obj-C is popular, just less popular than c++ (I think? Perhaps there are just easier ways to create apps for *nix and windows than Obj-C). I'm not sure about anything Java.

Javascript was an exception, IMO, because... they had a monopoly on being the only language that lets u modify webpage content programmatically.

As for C++, Java and so forth, popularity is no indicator of quality. That and Smalltalk/Smalltalk-esque languages had rocky starts, including difficulty of acquiring development environments and performance overhead.

EDIT: Concerning Objective-C, it's pretty tough to work with it outside of an OS X-related environment, because of the lack of essential libraries. There's GNUstep, which tries to fill in the gap, but it remains very behind and it has very little development going for it.

Its really about time for a new set of languages given a historical view (after you remove some of the distortions brought on by the Java bankroll).

> I have no particular background in programming languages design and theory

Well then, good news: most of these new languages -- especially those you mentioned -- were invented primarily with software engineers and programming in mind. That said, all are informed by ideas which emerged as PL design principles in the 1960's-1980's and became well-established in PLT academia throughout the 70's, 80's, 90's and 00's. Haskell is definitely an exception is many ways, but at least the essential ideas driving the type system design were there in the 80's. (with the possible exception of Haskell, where the "old ideas finally getting to market" analysis is a bit less true).

> I've been also on an exploration lately into the history of computer science and reading about the Lisp family and Smalltalk as they seem to viewed as the better designed ones.

I don't know about better designed. A better characterization is that they capture some essence -- lisp, smalltalk, SML, Haskell, etc. were all designed and implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of a certain programming style or discipline (as well how that approach makes certain problems really easy when they weren't easy before.)

> So what I don't understand and hope somebody here could shed some light on it is what's with all the new languages?

> How many of them really bring something new to the table, a better way than the old one?

> How is Go or Rust better than C C++ Ruby Python Lisps Java Smalltalk Erlang and whatnot.

A detailed answer would consider each pair. But broadly:

* These languages typed, which contrasts them from the dynamic family (including lisp).

* These languages tend to favor composition over inheritance, which differentiates them from (canonical) Java.

* These languages tend to make typed functional programming first-class (syntactic and compiler support for lambdas; pattern matching; etc.)

* The examples you've provided -- Rust, Go, Swift -- are more systems-oriented than Java and are not based on a VM.

* Lots of smaller things. E.g. apparently avoiding C++'s slow builds were a major design point for Go.

> Are those languages designed for very specific cases where older languages can't cope with.

Yes. All are designed to address some significant flaw with existing languages. Most were created because for an important set of language requirements, there exists a language which fulfills each requirement but no single language which fulfills all requirements. (Again, Haskell stands out as an experiment with laziness if I understand the history correctly).

> When I read about Smalltalk or Lisp or Haskell people regard them as the pinnacle of programming language design and yet their popularity isn't really proportional to those statements.

> How do languages get popular?

This is an area of active research (search for SocioPLT [1]). The common wisdom is "library support + important problem niche". The library thing strikes me as tautological.

> Money, syntax, portability?

The first is certainly a major reason the # languages exist :-)

> Why did PHP rule the 90' and not Common Lisp or Erlang or whatever.

Oh dear. Let's just agree that "quality" does not equal "popularity". Bieber > Vienna Philharmonic?

> Why do I read so much bad stuff about C++ from smart people yet it's one of the most popular languages. Why isn't Objective-C more popular since it is too C with classes? Why Java and not Self?

You'll receive lots of conjectures. I'll leave that business to others.

[1]

I thought the technical/scientific computing market that MATLAB serves was too niche to get critical mass in an open competitor that could surpass it. I saw Octave as always being a second place clone playing catch up. I don't know what it took to get it going but Julia has me very excited and I'm grateful for the team that chose to make it.

Give a newcomer sml with no easy way to integrate with a HTTP server and watch the confusion grow. On the other hand PHP has good apache integration, is a simple platform : a .php file with html and code, press F5 observe your results and is a deceptively non complex language.

While one can make an argument that these new languages address a particular need better than any extant language, I suspect the real reason is that it's more fun to create tools, including languages, than to solve particular business problems. As evidence, I offer the plethora of frameworks, libraries, and utilities that comprise the ecosystem of Java in particular. In many enterprise systems the business logic is a small fraction of the total running application.

"When I read about Smalltalk or Lisp or Haskell people regard them as the pinnacle of programming language design . . . ."

Lisp wasn't designed, it was discovered. ;-)

Thanks for the interesting questions.

* Sun invested a billion in Java to replace the more costlier Smalltalk. Instead of competing with Sun, IBM ditched Smalltalk and just went with Java, too.

Use C or C++ and then try out Go or Rust.

That's like saying you read about Bob Dylan being the pinnacle of songwriting, but his popularity compared to Beyonce not bearing that out.

'Better' being subjective, but there are languages, or classes of languages, that bring new paradigms that change the way you approach a problem. Some may work better with the way you mentally model a problem, or they may naturally help with modeling certain problems.

So we've got...

- Imperative sub-procedure languages, like C, Algol, Fortran, etc.

- Object-oriented variants of C, like C++, Java, C#.

- Smalltalk, and Smalltalk OOP based languages like Ruby and Objective-C.

- Forth, a stack-based programming language.

- Tcl, a command-based programming language.

- Unix shells, string-based programming languages.

- Lua/JavaScript, prototypal/hashtable oriented languages.

- Lisp, tree/list-oriented languages.

These are the languages/classes of languages you should study, if you want to see something different. Something that may change the way you think.

That's actually a similar story to Javascript, since it really didn't have any time to mature before shipping out to everyone. But I think both languages have improved as they've been upgraded. But make no mistake, we could have built them better if we started over now, and didn't have to worry about backwards compatibility. We have learned which parts we'd want to keep and which parts might require some ironing out.

Now, for the longest time, Haskell had a unofficial motto of "avoiding success at all costs"[1], (page 10). "When you become too well known, or too widely used and too successful suddenly you can’t change anything anymore. "

So, it's not a big surprise that Haskell isn't super popular, since the creators don't really benefit from it being super popular, and it makes their research harder.

[1]: http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/261007/a-z_programmi...

Do check out this article, it's great if you want to learn about languages. The whole site is. Page three talks about how languages pop out of nowhere: "In my experience, languages almost always come out of the blue."

Let me look at a few new languages

Go: It works great for concurrency, and shuns the hierarchies of OO for interfaces, but keeps the nice syntax. It feels a lot like Python even with it's static types. It's lack of proper generics cause it to get looked down upon sometimes by PL folks, and it's GC make it unpalatable for C/C++ tasks. I'm sure it's useful for Google.

C++11: It feels like a different language from C++. A lot of the verbosity of doing things the idiomatic way falls off (`for(const auto& x : things) {}` is much better than the old way). It definitely makes the language better, and can help speed it up and make it safer too.

Rust: It actually feels a bit like C++: The Good Parts, plus all the concurrency goodness from Go, and the little things you hate going without from Haskell (Algebraic Data Types is a big one). It's pretty ambitious, but if they can pull it off, I think it'll one of the best languages.

I'll pick Rust to beak down your question about how I think it's better. It's "better" than C++, because it leaves out all the foot shooting and messiness, and has just the good parts. And it's nice to have Option types without pulling in Boost. Compared to Ruby, well, it's aimed somewhere different, but I think it's faster while being at least close in expressively. Ditto for Python. Lisp, well, again, it's aimed differently, but Rust does have macros and strong functional programming support. Personally, I'd take the type system and leave Lisp behind. Java? Well, apart from not running on the JVM and being more complicated, I ...

Certain PLs exist to formulate certain ideas in certain ways, that the computer interpretes in certain ways. That way, the popularity of a PL depends on

1) how many people think that way,

2) how much effort those people put into developing the needed tools

3) how much this way of thinking is needed and supported by the industry

4) how well this way of thinking is compatible with previous work

5) how well the computer can execute these expressions using its architecture

6) what architectures exist for which purpose, and whether these purposes comply with the way ideas are expressed in a PL

7) ... and so on, this list is endless

For example, stack-based CISC computers using the von-neumann-model have a long history and are very powerful these days, and using software has become common in non-IT industries, which is why object-oriented imperative programming languages like Java and C++ are so common.

When some great programmers love a special language because because it matches their way of thinking, then it's most probable that this PL is not very popular, simply because few people think this way. A genius may invent the mightiest programming language in the world, but nobody else would use it because nobody else could understand it.

You could say, the only thing that a PL actually expresses can be seen on the people who use it.

One particularly good way is to be attached to an OS or platform.

- C came with Unix (although was so good that it migrated off it to Windows and basically every other platform).

- JavaScript came with the browser

- C# comes from an OS vendor; Microsoft. They built APIs for their platform in C#.

- Likewise, Objective C was for NeXT, and Swift is for iOS. They built APIs for their respective platforms.

- Java is an interesting case because Sun wanted the JVM to be an OS, to replace Windows, but they ended up with just a language. This is great evidence that a language itself is unprofitable; an OS/platform can be hugely profitable.

You have all the main OS cases represented: Unix, Apple, and Microsoft.

Google is sort of an OS/platform company, with Android and ChromeOS. However they reused Java in the former case. They designed their own VM (Dalvik) instead of inventing a new language. For the web platform, they are designing and implementing Dart. For the "cluster of servers" platform, Go is very appropriate.

Mozilla is also a platform company; it's not surprising that they are investing in Rust.

So my takeaway is that OS/platform vendors are the ones with the main interest in the huge effort of designing and implementing a language. How successful the platform often has more to do with the success of the language than the language itself. Java might be the exception.

Welcome to the war.

Please don't hold any hard feelings for the community if you get flagged or downvoted to hell. People who will do this to you are generally smart, sympathetic and considerate individuals who just were on the frontlines for much too long. Being cold-hearted and eliminating every threat swiftly, no matter how innocent it seems, is the only way of preserving one's sanity here.

I'm a PLT and Type Theory enthusiast, although I lack any formal education in this direction. I try to follow new research and I'm constantly learning new things (like the ones from the '60 which were then forgotten) and really new things (original research happening now which acknowledges what was done in the field already). I graduated (last year) from just learning new languages and I'm writing my toy languages (thanks to Racket's being an absolutely wonderful framework to do so), but I still learn every single language that seems interesting. This includes both nearly-mainstream languages like Erlang and the ancient, largely forgotten like Prolog, APL and Forth (which you should include in your list next to C, Smalltalk and Lisp).

I'm fascinated by the notion of computation, of how we can encode computation, how we can reason about computation and how we can transform computation to preserve its semantics. I'm fascinated by language design: what features a particular language has and what it omits, I'm always trying to discover what kind of turtle (and if really all the way down) a language is built upon. I'm feeling happy and safe reading papers from Racket and Haskell people, it feels like I'm reading a suspenseful novel in a quiet library somewhere.

Then I go to StackOverflow or here and the reality hits: screaming, shooting, blood and intestines everywhere, people fighting for their salaries and self-respect, so ultimately for their lives.

You'll hear about technicalities from other people here: type systems, concurrency primitives, memory safety and direct memory access, static vs. dynamic (not only typing), syntactic support for common idioms, having (or not) a built in support for certain concepts (like inheritance or composition). I'm not going to tell you about all this. I'd love to, and I really like the topic, but I feel that you wouldn't benefit from it nearly as much as from the other half of the story.

You see, programming languages are tools which people make for people to use. Not only that - both the makers and consumers do what they do to feed their families. I recently saw a Byte magazine from 1980 (IIRC) where I saw an ad of TinyPASCAL, which promised 4x increase in speed over the equivalent code in Basic. It came with some additional libraries (and it was available for a couple of different machines) and cost $8. There was another ad, which claimed that you won't ever need another Fortran after you buy the one being advertised, because it was fast and had additional libraries, for example (IIRC) for calculating log (or lg). It was some $15, I think. Not having lived then I miss a lot of context, but what I see here is that people were using programming languages to make money for quite a long time.

This is not a problem in itself. The problem is the nature of our industry, which is for the most part impossible to measure or experiment with. When have you last heard about double-blind (how would that even look like...) experiment of building the same large corporate system 5 times with different tools and simultaneously? I didn't. And that's not all. We are certain about some things, because the mathematicians discovered some very clever proofs of these things. But they are rare, few and far between. For my favourite example: what "readability" even <...

You might be more interested in Microsoft's as-yet-unreleased new language, which seems to be codenamed "Oslo"?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6974494

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6983649

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_(Microsoft)

http://joeduffyblog.com/2013/12/27/csharp-for-systems-progra...

http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/03/work-like-a-network-enter...

- C#: Microsoft's answer to Java, supposedly does some things better (Java seems to be catching up some), but cross-platform support is so-so.

- Go: I don't understand Go. It seems to be conceived as an improvement over C, and it gets many things right (and a few things wrong, like error handling). Unfortunately, it gets the most important things wrong: performance and low-level access, which are the only reason anyone uses C nowadays. If you don't need C's performance, you get languages that are much nicer and faster than Go (like Java or C#). As a result, it drew Python programmer rather than C programmer, because Go is still faster than Python, and feels quite similar to basic uses of it. Also Go seems to draw people who have drunk too much of the anti-OO kool-aid.

- Swift: A bit too new to tell. Objective-C was a notable improvement on C without incurring the complexity of C++. It suffers of a bit of Go syndrome, but Apple forces you to use it, so there's no debate to be had. Swift is an improvement over Objective-C. It seems to be that this heritage lead to some shoehorning and there are maybe clunky angles to how some things were designed (i.e. the type system).

- C++: many people have said it, C++ is very powerful but it's way too easy to break everything in a subtle manner without realizing it. The problem of C++ is that it has a very large set of core features, which can all interact in ways that are hard-to-predict if one is not a language lawyer. C++ is the opposite of elegance in language design. Despite this, it is used because it is fast and gets stuff done (good expressiveness). And if you run into strange feature interaction, you can always work your way around them by making the design a bit more ugly, thereby avoiding to have to gaze into the pit of hell.

- Rust: very interesting because it promises more safety when doing low-level work, while retaining performance. I'm still waiting for the development dust to settle to give it an in-depth look.

- Smalltalk: the language itself is nice enough, kind of like a Ruby that would have been pushed to the level in terms of meta-programming. The environment, however is awful. The "image" in which you work completely traps you, and has a super poor UX despite the inclusion of very powerful introspection/debugging tools. At any rate, Ruby is mostly good enough, and you rarely need the added meta-stuff from Smalltalk.

- Erlang: genuinely useful for its use case, distributed systems. This is a language where the intended use was really woven in the language design, to great effect. For the rest, it's a bit like ML without types. Personally, I see no good reason for leaving out types, so that tends to annoy me a bit.

- PHP: Many things (mostly bad) have been said about it, and many of them true. However, its success is not undeserved in the sense that it was a very easy language to get started with, from the fact that it could be embedded inside the html directly (allowing for nifty cut-and-pasting) to the availability of easy-to-configure servers. It also has top-notch documentation.

- Common Lisp: The problem of Common Lisp is that it feels old. Many things seem antiquated, especially the library ecosystem. It's very hard to tell if there are good libraries, because the ecosystem is so scattered. Some libraries may not have been worked on for some time, but still be adequate, but that's hard to tell beforehand. There is few endorsement/sponsorship of libraries/tools by organizations or companies; most artifacts are the product of the work of some lone hacker (at least, that's how it feels). Maybe quicklisp is solving the problem, but then again, it's in "beta" since 2012. As for the language itself, well it is quite nice with all the macros and stuff, albeit I once again miss types (mostly for documentation pur...

- LLVM is an awesome project and quite mainstream now, making it a bit easier to write an optimized compiler.

- Rust: C is a language built for single core use. The future is many-core machines. Mozilla realized that the archaic C language was making multi-core processing far more difficult because of missing language constructs, slowing down development and holding back the future of browser performance. The idea is that multicore/multichip aware languages can greatly simplify developing parallel applications.

- Go: Also aims to modernize "systems languages". Dependency management, better type systems, garbage collection, parallel computing. multi-core awareness, compile times. http://mashable.com/2009/11/10/go-google-language/ . It's your C/C++ replacement.

- Swift: Probably an Apple move to attract more app developers and to increase the quality of apps with better tools.

So the answer is both because the computing landscape is changing, and the move towards Python, despite its performance issues, signals developer demand for better tools.

Remember that HN/proggit users are generally interested in new ideas and ways of working, and most people working in industry have probably never heard of Haskell. HN is also susceptible to marketing from time-to-time - MongoDB and Rails were two huge trends that did not deserve their popularity, at least at the time.

  tl;dr they want to make things better

But worse than products, languages are high-tech products. This makes them harder to evaluate, so the bandwagon effect is even stronger (oh, smarter-than-me guy says this is cool, I'll believe it). That makes it even more unpredictable.

But worse than high-tech products, there are network effects: it matters hugely how many other people are using it... because they make libraries which makes it even better. They also use your libraries, making it more attractive. That is, a language is a market, itself. This makes it more unpredictable again.

Finally, why do people make new languages? Well, there is real progress in language design. People just want to make things better. For example, Go is written by the C guys... they want to make it better. (NB: no guarantee of success! those guys also wrote unix, and tried to improve it with Plan 9. "What's Plan 9?", you ask curiously. Exactly.)

Of course, the big companies with money also want to capture developers, instead of sharing, so instead of one language with the cool new features, you have several. Just like in most markets, when there's an improved style of product.

EDIT what about smalltalk, lisp, haskell? partly it's the bandwagon effect that passed these by... partly it's the purity of a cool idea. This makes them attractive to idealists, and unattractive to pragmatists. e.g. homoiconicism is a very elegant idea, but awkward, complex, unintuitive - everything is sacrificed to its pure beauty.

These are like indie artists who haven't sold out.

Really, it's the intellectual analog of the process by which a whirling disk of dust becomes a system of planets, some big, some small...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here

Every big tech company has to have one.