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Comment by sseagull | Hacker News Reader

I'll be kinda honest here, but one thing that pops into my head is to stop developing so many new languages and workflows. It's hard to build any sort of critical mass (paying or not) around hundreds or thousands of tiny communities.

I'm not saying there needs to be only one programming language out there, but I get overwhelmed at the fragmentation. I am someone who programs to get things done not to sit back in awe at the beauty of programming languages, and there have been small projects that I have wanted to do that were impossible because my dependencies were spread across different languages (some of which I was not familiar with).

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You’re getting downvoted but I agree with this. Fragmentation tends to become a pathological situation where the ecosystem ends up consisting of mostly promising but half baked solutions and h th is gets dominated by big, boring, awful but corporate financed solutions.

I know a lot of people like Java but Java is exactly that.

This. So many languages I run across would have been better off as a domain-specific language hosted on top of Common Lisp. Instead of learning a new language, we could grow our vocabulary.

We need more languages, not fewer. We need all the experimental languages, the attempts at solving issues at the language level, to get to the next Good Language. We've got plenty of Good Languages right now, but we don't get others without a LOT of little languages getting made and inspiring the next ones.

Not an interesting take.

You want to benefit off the work of others, and bear zero cost. What if you just built those libraries yourself, or paid someone else to do it for you?

And on language creation and development, why should we stop exploring, discovering and innovating? To make you more productive? What a joke.

> You want to benefit off the work of others, and bear zero cost. What if you just built those libraries yourself

No one can do that to any large scale. That is all there is to say about that.

And all my projects are open source. I give back to the community and to science (see below).

> To make you more productive?

There's intent, and then there's reality.

I work in scientific programming, and scientists are absolutely struggling with software development. Not programming, but everything related to package management, version control, distribution, different languages, incompatible ecosystems, etc.

There is complexity in the boundaries of packages, languages, and ecosystems. That is unsolved and no one seems to care about it as long as you can do this cool things with your own language.

Someone's intent could be to make python package management easier. The reality is that having only a few people adopt that can make the entire community suffer.

Fragmentation is a problem that solves itself, though. People tend to preferentially attach to larger communities and small communities tend to evaporate into a "hard core" of very dedicated people. If you look at the market as a whole, Java, JS, C# and other mainstream stuff is still most of everything. Whether that's good or not is a different issue.

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