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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Languages are not created in a planned, thought-through manner

Well, some are. Namely, Algol, Scheme, Smalltalk, Java, C#, and famously Ada (And I've missed some, like Oberon, etc).

Those were planned, and thought-through quite well. And their later updates were also planned and thought out quite thorougly.

Other languages were more idiosyncratically designed by some (often single) person, and accrued features haphazardly over time.

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Just want to add Haskell, that was planned and thought-through for a very long time, and the purpose of it being planned was especially to slow down the proliferation of too many (research) programming languages, by providing a base/platform language that will be used for future research:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

> Other languages were more idiosyncratically designed by some (often single) person, and accrued features haphazardly over time.

Some of those are quite successful. Top examples, and very fitting of your description are javascript and php. Interestingly, both of those made nearly the same (in my opinion wrong) descission about comparison operators and "type juggling" (php parlance).

Scala 3, it has even its own calculus (DOT) to formally prove the soundness of its type system. https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2016/02/03/essence-of-scala....

I meant languages as a whole. To my knowledge no one has ever looked at the market and said: "Well, we obviously lack an interpreted functional language with a polymorphic type system, call-by-value evaluation and manual memory management. Let's make one."

Well, their first versions were, when they were initially introduced. Just consider how much legacy cruft C# has accumulated over the years, though. (Does anyone remember delegate?) If C# 9 was re-designed from the ground up, it would drop a lot of nonsense from the early days.

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