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Comment by brainless | Hacker News Reader

I have been programming for about 30 years (including school years). Professionally for 18 years.

Can anyone tell me why we have 40 or more programming languages, with about 10 popular ones? Then about 20 frameworks in each of them. And add another 200 popular libraries for each language? This matrix make no sense till you realize - it is preferences all the way down.

Most of us engineers have built our own mental model of programming. We are all right. But the users do not care. LLMs are here to produce code closer and closer to the metal as needed. They can sit and create a graph out of every spec, use an AST that they develop and run on the CPU if they have to. They will do it. No amount of us discussing will stop that.

Programming is going to be re-invented. I do not think the current ways to write software will even matter.

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Your comment started strong. "30 years programming experience", asking interesting questions, I really hoped you'd say something profound... then it went down to whatever this is. The reason there are many programming languages and frameworks isn't programmer's preferences but rather their utility in solving specific problems. Take Prolog for example. Can you technically do what it does in JS? Yes. Can you do frontend in Prolog? Probably yes, but you wouldn’t [ab]use one tool when the other is due. Your argument reads as someone who claims to be a professional but opens the toolbox and says: "do you know why there are so many tools?" And then goes to answer: "because I like it so"! What the ... ?

If a language is Turing complete, why build another language right on top? Most of the interpreted languages are running an engine written in C. Was C not enough? Or was it that we needed abstraction?

It is nice to be in our bubble but if what you said is true, why do we only have like 3 major instruction sets? Why not 40? Programming languages are just easy to create - this is a good thing and we created too many. But it absolutely fractured the industry.

Look at the average job post. There are requirements for system design - good. Algorightms - good. Then it goes into this whole language/framework land. Remembering syntax is literally there in many companies interview. These are preferences. If we understand how a computer executes binary/assembly, the layers above are not as relevant as we have made them.

Yes, we need abstraction. X being written in Y doesn't mean you can build the same systems, with the same adaptability, reliability, and performance, within the same time and cost.

Obviously there are also unnecessary differences between tools, and hiring shouldn't focus on easily transferred skills

> Can anyone tell me why we have 40 or more programming languages, with about 10 popular ones?

Because too many of the rest of you lack the good taste to use Lisp.

I have personally wanted to learn and actually use Lisp. I will get to it, even with all the LLM enabled programming. But yes, this is one of those things.

We have reinvented so many ideas many different ways in many different languages and frameworks simply because we want our flavored version.

> it is preferences all the way down

No you're falling victim to the common programmer fallacy that "my use case is everyone's use case"

These things exist because people had different use cases and priorities over the years

How many of the popular languages are running C underneath? Count them, I will wait.

I'm a bit slow, I don't get the C argument?

What I mean is that a lot of the popular languages have an engine written in C. Fairly common pattern. I get it that we want to abstract but sometimes it feels we just want to avoid dealing with a language that is one layer below.

Now, LLMs can.

I agree with what you said, and _sometimes_ it's true, but I still wouldn't call it a "preference". One could argue there isn't a "need" to deliver faster and come up with solutions to problems, but is it a "preference"?

Maybe I'm completely off base here, arguing about semantics.

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