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Comment by vincnetas | Hacker News Reader

"Would you agree that some programming languages are better than others? If so then one of them must be the best."

Unless of course there are multiple dimensions of "Good". I in my opinion this is exactly the case. There are best languages per dimension, but not absolutely best.

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Ah, but you forget the attention economy that the internet amplified: only controversial takes are discussed, nobody wants to read your reasonable and nuanced blog post because everybody can silently agree with it already. Without any crucial insight or big controversy nobody will read it. And the latter likes to masquerade as the former most of the time.

It makes me sad how right you are. Particularly: > And the latter likes to masquerade as the former most of the time.

Hear hear !

It need not even be multiple dimensions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partially_ordered_set:

“a partial order on a set is an arrangement such that, for certain pairs of elements, one precedes the other. The word partial is used to indicate that not every pair of elements needs to be comparable; that is, there may be pairs for which neither element precedes the other”

Even if there's one dimension, this is not a logically correct statement. Some numbers are bigger than others, but there is no biggest number. Or it could be a partial ordering - say that a number x is "better" than y if y divides x. Then out of the first hundred numbers, some are better than others but there's no single "best".

Yes! It depends. That's why there are so many languages that still exist. Otherwise it would be a winner-takes-all situation and there would be just one left standing.

Even per dimension there will be different preferences. There's no objectivity in most of them, perhaps even none.

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