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Comment by enneff | Hacker News Reader

Syntax is by far the least interesting thing about any new programming language, but they spend paragraphs talking about braces and semicolons.

And the conclusions are bizarre and uninformed:

> When Sun rolled out Java in 1995, everyone thought it would be a dandy tool for building browser applets that made images dance, yet its destiny was mostly server-side.

Uhhh... what? Sun pushed for Java for _everything_, and they were hugely successful in doing so.

> For developers, then, choosing a language is like choosing citizenship in a country. You’re not only buying into syntax and semantics. You’re buying into economics and culture, the rules that shape how you earn your livelihood and the forces that channel your hopes and dreams.

Learning a language is nothing like choosing citizenship. You can learn and use many languages in parallel. Most programmers do.

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> > When Sun rolled out Java in 1995, everyone thought it would be a dandy tool for building browser applets that made images dance, yet its destiny was mostly server-side.

> Uhhh... what? Sun pushed for Java for _everything_, and they were hugely successful in doing so.

IIRC, Sun initially was thinking of Java for embedded systems. But garbage-collected embedded systems weren't going to fly in 1995 - the GC latency would be too long.

True, Sun tried to push Java everywhere. But where did it wind up? "Mostly server-side" seems like a valid statement. Yeah, it could run in the browser. Yeah, it could run on your desktop. But there weren't tons of Java desktop apps that I can recall, and it kind of lost out on the browser. So, mostly server-side.

Which is a shame really. Java took a gamble on visual uniformity for cross platform interfaces and lost big time there. Not to mention that applets took ages to load compared to flash apps.

> But where did it wind up?

In most enterprise stacks, and powering all the apps on the majority of the world's smartphones (Android).

"Syntax is by far the least interesting thing about any new programming language, but they spend paragraphs talking about braces and semicolons."

I can't seem to locate the quote for this, but I believe there is a famous witticism on programming languages, which more or less states that arguments about the trivial issues of a language generate the most heated discussion, with syntax being simultaneously the most contentious and the least important.

Wadler's Law: https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Wadler%27s_Law

    In any language design, the total time spent discussing
    a feature in this list is proportional to two raised to
    the power of its position.

           0. Semantics
           1. Syntax
           2. Lexical syntax
           3. Lexical syntax of comments

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