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Comment by thekingofh | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone noticed an extreme explosion in languages? It seems like a good hobby project to create your own language and then evangelize evangelize evangelize.

I'm all for advancement, but this feels like overload. We have each of the big companies promoting their own languages. Microsoft: C# (and other flavors), Apple: Swift, Google: Go, Mozilla: Rust... I'm sure I could keep going, but that seems to be the trend lately. You can't be a big company and not have your own programming language.

So I guess the language changes for each domain. There is no longer the dream of a single language to unite all the plebes! Maybe it was a dream anyways.

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I'm all for advancement, but this feels like overload. We have each of the big companies promoting their own languages. Microsoft: Visual Basic, Apple/NeXT: Objective-C, Bell Labs: C and C++, Sun: Java... I'm sure I could keep going, but that seems to be the trend lately. You can't be a big company and not have your own programming language.

By the way, C# has been around for 17 years.

True. And it's a beautiful language. I'm not necessarily knocking the other languages either. It's just that it seems that the fragmentation is becoming an issue, when all that development effort doesn't seem to necessarily be generating more value. I'm sure it's possible by all of this experimentation someone will stumble upon the next Javascript, or the next C. So there may be a benefit in the long run. Or maybe not.

I think this is the future. There will always be a few main do-anything languages, but we're going to see languages that fit certain use cases becoming very common.

Historically languages were limited by their compilers and VMs. You ran Java or C++ because it took a large company to come up with a fast enough environment. Now we have the tools and experience that anyone can create a fast enough language in a few weeks.

Also historically, if you wanted your code to run faster, the answer was pretty much always to move to a lower level language. Java too slow? Use C++. C++ too slow? Use C and/or optimize choke points with assembly.

The tooling exists now that we can solve a lot of those same hard problems using languages and tools designed to solve them without reinventing the wheel in C or assembly.

I see what you're saying between Swift, Go, and Rust, but I'm not sure C# belongs in the same category. There are orders of magnitude more real-life lines of code implemented in C# than the other three combined. It's much more comparable to Java.

F# may be a better comparison.

Indeed, Microsoft wanted to use a modified Windows-centric version of Java called J++, but Sun wouldn't let them, so they created C#.

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