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Comment by kristiandupont | Hacker News Reader

Why should every city have a theatre?

Is there any reason to "leave features to others" if they make sense in your own language? The only issue I can come up with is that some language might die off because it doesn't have any unique features. But if that happens and the momentum is not enough to keep it alive, that doesn't seem like loss to me anyway.

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I don’t know, it just feels like a bit of a boring world if every language looks the same, instead of prodding you to look at the world from a slightly different angle.

I really don’t see this criticism. Yes, all of these features have existed in some form in prior languages. But I wouldn’t say that this makes JS “look like” Haskell.

Agreed. But if F#’s pipe operator makes it to Hack and JavaScript, null chaining makes it to C#, CoffeeScript, and JavaScript, value types make it to Haskell, Clojure, and JS, etc.. Eventually the overlap between different languages’ features grows larger.

Like, I absolutely agree with you here. Languages are starting to stabilise when it comes to syntax, features are getting cross pollinated from other languages faster, etc.

I think it's wonderful. Developers can move between languages interchangeably, teaching burden is reduced, languages aren't dismissed because they lack feature X.

That’s a valid way to look at it, too.

The pipe operator is such a simple bit of syntax I see no reason why it shouldn’t be in most languages. No one complains about the addition operator syntax looking the same in most languages.

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