Something I’m genuinely curious about with people who really like Rust, Clojure, etc, and want to use it for everything. If you had a say, which way of the programming ecosystem developing would you personally prefer, and why? Like, if your favourite language is Rust, and Go or C++ started developing features similar to Rust, like a borrow checker and better compile time error checking, would you see that as a good thing that other languages are getting the same benefits of Rust? What about other organisations started making new programming languages with similar benefits as Rust? Or would you rather that none of those happened and everything that wants Rust’s benefits just converged to using Rust?
I don’t know about converging. What tends to happen naturally is that when a niche opens up, dozens of languages pop up to fill it. The most popular ones win while the others fizzle out and stop getting developed. They can take inspiration from others of course. I think a lot of developers would be upset if a language they were using were merged into another one.
I’m all for languages adding new features and even new paradigms though. The big one lately is all these languages adding lambda functions. This enables people to program using a functional paradigm which has benefits for security and testability, and lets you apply formulaic proofs to code. So if you want to write code functionally you are not stuck using Haskell. You have C++, Java, Python, JavaScript. Each of these designed for a different runtime environment. You don’t need to multiply each type of programming paradigm with each type of runtime environment needing countless different languages. Instead the languages people are familiar with become more powerful which is a good thing.
