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Comment by ken | Hacker News Reader

Of course, every successful language could be roasted with this, too.

It's a cute post but if there were a simple checklist for creating a successful language, every language designer would just do that.

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But you can't fill out the checklist "correctly", that's the entire point. A lot of these points are mutually exclusive, and which point to pick is a matter of conviction a lot of the time. Some of these points can be checked no matter the language (eg, you appear to believe that scaling to large projects will be easy).

This is particularly obvious in the "Your language has/lacks" section, where whichever choice you make can be argued against for almost every point.

The point is that you there is no such thing as a perfect language and the success of a language rarely depends on the kind of criteria that programmers will judge them on at first glance, and success is a relative thing.

Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++, is often quoted with this statement: "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."

I suppose, scathing criticism in that respect is the highest form of praise.

If you’re not making anybody angry, you’re not doing anything important.

But making people angry doesn't imply that you're doing something important though.

Well yeah, it’s necessary but not sufficient. ;)

Off topic but I attended a talk by Stroustrup on C++ and one of my favourite parts was when he was asked what his thoughts were on Java or C#.

“I don’t like to talk badly about C++ applications.”

If not strictly true nowadays it was still funny.

It's not intending to be. Pretty sure it's a joke. (See the last checklist block on the page

joke for sure, made me laugh out loud :)

Define "successful language". Popularity of a programming language doesn't mean success. COBOL, Fortran and Pascal used to be hugely popular, now with every passing year, it is costing more and more money to support systems that once considered as "successfully built".

Sadly, it seems in a few decades, pretty much that would be the fate of every single PL in TIOBE's Top. All popular PLs of today are morally outdated. Programming languages of future would be striving for:

a) Developer's productivity

b) Execution performance

c) Correctness of the program

And none of the popular languages today are making good progress in any of those directions.

Pascal has never been popular. Certain offshoots of Pascal got popular, none so much as Delphi. Which some people still use.

Maybe not in the US. It was pretty popular for example in the USSR back in 1980-90ies.

I bet it was some dialect with non-standard extensions to make it actually useful. Like all the ones ever actually used, but different.

Well, yes – it's satire.

Uh, that’s the joke isn’t it?

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