plsceptic

>Is anyone who does anything and puts it out there craving attention? Maybe they just want to, I don't know, share.

I never said everyone was motivated purely by vanity, just that it is a major motivator and possible explanation for certain perceived excesses (of languages, frameworks).

>did you know who Roberto was? Would you be able to pick out Gilad Bracha in a grocery store?

I'm typing these messages on a machine with NewSpeak installed on it.

Your response, colored for me by the downvote I received roughly when you posted it, consists largely of hand waving. Maybe my perception of PL research papers is horribly skewed, but the ones I've read are as I described: conjecture unsupported by evidence. The fact that some researchers are trying to do better is laudable, but it doesn't redeem the field of PL research as a whole.

This bit in particular struck be as absurd:

>Trust me, there is no glory to be had in this game

Humans naturally crave fame, and programmers are no exception. Look at all the developers with Github and Twitter profiles and blogs; are you telling me these people don't want attention?

Inventing a programming languages is one of the few ways that's been shown, on occasion, to make a programmer famous. We all know who Larry Wall, Matz, and Guido are. Frameworks, both front-end and back-end, are another (and I suspect that's part of the reason why we're up to our neck in JS frameworks). Look at DHH, for example. He's a programmer of modest ability who got so famous through Rails that Alan Kay quotes are mis-attributed to him, meanwhile I doubt you know who Daniel Veillard is, despite him being the principal author of LibXML2, one of the most heavily-used pieces of software in the world.

I don't think the author actually demonstrated the usefulness of PL research, at least not enough to convince me of it. For that I would need to see actual, regular controlled experiments from PL researchers showing that a given language or construct yields measurable dividends over another, such as reductions in deficits, program size, or development time. Instead what you get from PL researchers is papers full of conjecture advocating some such language or construct, but seldom any scientific evidence to support any of it. Further, programming languages by themselves, in 2015, don't matter that much. Unless a language has an industrial-strength implementation, a robust tool chain, and a vast collection of libraries, it won't, or at least shouldn't, gain widespread adoption.

I think we have far too many languages as it is. Of all the languages I've learned or at least been exposed to, only a handful were genuinely novel, such as Common Lisp/Scheme, Smalltalk, and Haskell, and rest were mere reskins of C. The compile-to-JavaScript languages are easily some of the worst offenders, and it leads me to wonder, how many new languages are the product of a good faith effort to solve a yet-unsolved or poorly-solved problem, and how many spring largely from the vanity of their inventor, who dreams of becoming the next great BDFL, being invited to give keynotes at conferences, and capriciously giving his thumb up or down to enhancement proposal like a Roman Emperor deciding on the fate of a fallen gladiator in the Colosseum?

I actually think we as an industry could benefit from a PL moratorium. How many of us have had to use a language with poor or no IDE support, or one that lacked native code compilation (JiT or otherwise), or that had gaping holes in its standard library simply because it was new and trendy?