dogsandcats

Honestly, most of my junior-level coworkers would not even be able to do the first days without help.

Those AOC tasks are training for skills most developers don't really need or train much (except maybe reading comprehension). Most code is quite boring, especially web dev stuff. Most of the interesting stuff is handled by external packages, you are just supposed to pipe it all together. It is still quite complicated work sometimes but in a very different way. It is only few developer that get to work on truly interesting stuff on their day job.

So the great thing is that AOC has something for everyone. A junior can take his programming skills to the next level, flexing some muscle he doesn't otherwise get to use. Advanced people can use it to either get to know a new language or take on code golfing and learn to abuse their favorite language in a new way.

> Not necessarily an indication of actual user base; could just be that more/less devs of each "group" are deciding to participate.

Could be also AOC getting more popular and hitting the developer mainstream more, hence skewing the percentages more in favor of mainstream tools. The absolute number of devs from "fringe" groups might have stayed constant.

Though VS Code is also getting quite popular in general, so probably that too. It is quite lightweight, just works and setting up new languages is a matter of a few clicks. Honestly the only reason I am not using it (other then not trusting or wanting to support Microsoft), is that the VIM emulation does not feel quite right for me.

This is kind of like the learn a programming language to get a job vs expand your mind discussion

If you want to learn a language for being able to talk to more people then yeah, most conlangs don't make sense. (Except maybe Esperanto for having a huge international community that is bigger than some smaller natural languages).

If anything, conlangs are good for filtering for people that share the interest of learning conlangs (which might be positively correlated with people being interested in linguistics, other cultures, open minded, nerdy or whatever) but not much for expanding the total mass of people you can talk to. It is a pretty nerdy hobby that many people do for the pleasure if learning the language itself. (Similar to hacking in a non mainstream programming language)

As for learning, adults and children do learn differently. While both profit from language immersion, adults do profit much more by explicitly learning grammar. It is a bit of personal preference though. For example I dislike learning vocabulary so I rely more on immersion and looking things up as I go. This might be slower but is more fun to me.

I should not be that hard to find other people learning Toki Pona on the internet but of course meeting some in real life might be difficult. So i agree with your point that total language immersion like you can do when traveling to a country were your target language is spoken is not possible with Toki Pona. You need to be fine with learning from books and videos.

I am not sure if I get your point. Yes, having a small base vocabulary has trade offs and yes it is true that you will have to not just learn the meaning of every single word but also common idioms.

You can be up and running very fast in Toki Pona being able to produce and understand simple sentences about broad topics. If you need to be very specific, you will have a hard time but the philosophy of Toki Pona is to strive for simplicity and to focus on your core message.

You would have a hard time writing a scientific paper in Toki Pona but that is not what is was designed for anyway.

What language people have trouble learning can be a bit subjective and also heavily depend on the learning material and other outside factors. Sounds like Toki Pona didn't "click" with you which is fair enough. Maybe you want to give it another try or maybe it just is not for you, there are other interesting conlangs.

Toki Pona is relatively easy to learn not just for the small base vocabulary but also the relative simple phonology (Only 9 consonants and 5 vowel, always stress on initial syllable). Learning how to pronounce and write Toki Pona is extremely easy and regular.

Vocabulary is probably what takes the longest time in language learning, so you get a huge head start. The grammar might be very different to English or Dutch but has many similarities to Asian languages and is not that complex. As I argued for learning Toki Pona for mind expansion, I would argue that the difference is a good thing anyway.

That was an issue with the language Loglan where the author claimed copyright on the language. As a reaction the community created Lojban. Basically GNU/Lojban.

Whether you really can copyright a language is pretty dubious though, probably not. In the case of Loglan it was not enforceable but Lojban is now far more popular anyway, so it is moot.

As for Toki Pona in practice it is not much of an issue because the free learning material is good enough. The language is very small and not that strictly defined anyway but I get your concern.

Toki Pona is great as an introduction into language learning.

As many English speaking people seem to be functionally monolingual they could greatly benefit from learning it.

It would probably be the human language equivalent of a pure Java programmer spending a weekend hacking Lisp in broadening your horizon.

Even if you don't end up using Toki Pona, you will still benefit greatly from it. Due to its small size you will be able to acquire a certain "mastery" over it in just a few days which can be greatly motivating for tackling bigger languages.

Honest beginner question: Why wouldn't I just unwrap the values first and then do computation with the unwrapped values?

I get how Maybe types can be useful for parsing something or doing IO but once you get your Maybe value, wouldn't be the first action to unwrap it? If it is Nothing you can either provide a default value or just stop right there. I don't see the sense of dragging the Nothing further done with you and having to deal with potential nothingness further done the stack even if you have the tools to make it look nice.

Maybe there are other functors where this makes more practical sense?