It's understandable why a company like Apple would seek Swift to be familiar to developers, but I don't know why new efforts that will be building a community from scratch would do this.
We need more imagination and more bold deviations from the norm, if any of these languages will make sense to pick up for a dev out there.
But I miss an ecosystem of people doing something about it. This variety is required for healthy progress in a field. So people can inspire one another, and lead to significantly new efforts. One instance is nothing, despite of course everyone believes they're making the language that'll take over the world.
I often open a new language's site, anticipating innovation and how what I do compares with them. And it's always disappointing to see "it's like X but slightly better" because "X but slightly better" has no chance to overtake an incumbent, and also it shows attitude where we think all there's to discover has been discovered, and it's just tweaks and patches now on, with a new brand label on top.
Nothing can be farther from the truth.
> We need more imagination and more bold deviations from the norm
This is what I reacted on, a bit too compactly - apologies. Let me unzip.
My problem is that this statement 1) feels so far removed from reality, 2) I'm so much interested in this space that this hurts.
Why would you recommend others to throw out the good ideas of decades of research just to be hip? Evolution doesn't work that way. Humans didn't evolve by throwing away state-of-the-art apes. Evolution happens by changing one or few bits at a time and iterating while selecting for the good. This means there will be many programming languages that look just like those before them - at least to the untrained eyes.
Mutable value semantics is one of the most fascinating ideas in programming. It's like the good parts of functional programming without the bad parts. I'm pretty certain it will revolutionize programming. To dismiss it as being close to existing languages blows my mind.
I get that it's hard for any language to take hold without being 10x better. At the same time, it feels naive to build a 10x better language without keeping the good parts of existing languages. Not removing good ideas is as important as adding good ideas.
Also, humans are 'stateful', switching costs are real. 10x better not only includes the upsides but also the downsides. Hence, it feels like a sane strategy to not only maximize the upsides of new ideas, but at the same time minimize the downsides of not only removed good ideas but also changes in general, to minimize switching costs.