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Comment by nimmer | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see Nim on this diagram: https://talks.golang.org/2016/applicative.slide#13 - it could be close to the top right corner.

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I would contend that java should be considerably lower on the fun scale. Maybe they are counting other languages that target the JVM?

Also perl is apparently as fun for humans python which I also find suspect after maintaining perl 5.x code.

Turns out this subjective made up graph is subjective and made up I guess.

> Also perl is apparently as fun for humans python which I also find suspect after maintaining perl 5.x code.

When people talk about a language being 'fun', they need to distinguish between writing something new for the first time vs maintaining something or figuring out someone else's code.

Yeah I suppose at this point the graph falls apart since even the prospect of writing new perl code does not sound fun to me but I am sure could be fun to someone.

Yeah, I wouldn't want to be writing new Perl either. It was actually Ruby's "optimized for developer happiness" mantra that triggered my comment.

Sometimes I mumble under my breath that Ruby is Perl for the 21st century - gleefully creative hackers leaving behind overly clever code for far less happy developers to deal with.

A culture of optimising the elegance of the API over the simplicity and maintenance of the implementation.

I disagree. With practice, you can write very clean Perl code that's easy to follow along because all the modules play along nicely. Ruby OTOH has a culture of gems doing all kinds of mysterious black magic that make it difficult for a maintainer to figure out the data flow.

Source: Maintained a 300 kLOC Perl application for 3 years, now working with legacy and new Rails applications.

Absolutely. It's unfortunate that Nim is relatively unknown - here's hoping it gets a large backer sometime soon to boost its popularity!

I'd also add D (above C++, level with Java) and Rust (above C++, close to Go).

And Crystal (http://crystal-lang.org/).

Definitely, but isn't Crystal still in its early stages? I heard it doesn't even have Windows support yet for example.

Yes, you're right that it is in an early stage of development and doesn't yet support Windows (to be fair, even Rust added full Windows support fairly late in their development cycle to 1.0). Crystal is probably in a slightly earlier stage than Nim, though not by much. Both are very interesting languages that I think would plot in similar locations on the chart. D is also a lot of fun. I think all are competing in this same native compiled realm that seems to be popular right now.

Rust had "windows support" far before 1.0, though it was through minGW only for the first few years. MSVC support was added four days after 1.0 was released.

The go devs are very careful to avoid mention of all the other languages that compete in the same space and are significantly better.

Indeed. Where is Haskell? OCaml? Rust? Scala? C#?

Good point, but in the end it's a subjective graph.

Hey, they are Google! Java 6 is probably the most "modern" thing they can think of!

bradfitz created that graph from his subjective experience, and he was talking about the state of things in 2009.

FWIW, here's the Go project lead congratulating Rust on their recent birthday: https://twitter.com/_rsc/status/732379957129826305

I'd love to hear about those languages.

Erlang and Ada are two that I consider superior to Go.

The whole axis is so subjective. It really depends what you are working on. For certain tasks you can even find C more fun than other languages.

I think what they were trying to show is whether languages are high or low level (i.e. how far are they from machine code). In C for example every statement (maybe except switch) you can guess what assembly code it would translate to. Not so much with languages on top.

Nim is interesting, but in my opinion, it wants to kill to much bird in one shoot.

I'm just amazed that yavascript wound up on top.

JavaScript and Perl are fun to write. Not sure about maintaining large code base though

Agreed. The definition of "fun to write" completely changes with respect to the size of the codebase, and the number of people working on it.

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