On Sunday, 29 March 2015 at 15:34:35 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
Actually, there is quite a large overlap if you look beyond the
syntax. Dart is completely unexciting, but I also find it very
productive when used with the IDE.
Glad to hear this - I haven't yet got very far with Dart, but it
seems like a toss-up between Dart and Livescript for a passable
language to run on the client (for my little use case).
Anyway, my point was more that making Python a target means you
have to compete with a large set of other languages in the same
vein. In the system language area you only have C++/Rust so it
is an easier target. Unfortunately C++ still has a lot of
advantages over other languages for real world projects, so it
will remain my system level language until a better language
starts polishing their low level stuff... :-/
Peter Thiel is right. Competition is overrated, and it is much
better to have a monopoly in a small domain and build out from
there - one shouldn't think in terms of acquiring market share if
one is not already one of the dominant players (and even then to
do so is often counterproductive).
D isn't a product marketed by Proctor and Gamble. So nobody is
going to make Python a target, as best I can tell. But one can
surely learn from what they do right, to the extent that it
applies to new conditions of the future. The obvious things are
documentation, libraries, and having a nice, easy-to-install, and
low-friction set of choices in development stacks organised and
available.
Knuth is also right that people think in different ways, and it's
an entirely natural thing to see a multiplicity of languages
emerging that are adapted to these different ways (and of course
the particular challenges people face are also different).
That's why religious wars about these things have a bad name.
That doesn't mean people shouldn't have a perspective and argue
for it when such discussions are generative.
D will continue to gather success if it keeps getting better and
confronting the painful challenges of growth, as seems to me to
be happening in my short time here. Naysayers are an asset if
one doesn't get discouraged, because it is difficult to buy good
criticism at any price.
