This is great to see.

LLVM just lost a contributor upset by the LLVM Community Code of Conduct. In my experience projects progress much faster when people are polite and decent. The fewer jerks on any team or platform, the better.

I believe the rise of so many new programming languages in the past few years is in response to a reconsideration and reflection of what people like and dislike about current programming languages and not yet finding a language that is as great as they imagine a language could be. I suspect someone could write a book on this topic but I just wanted to document a few thoughts and notes.

• There is a renewed interest in performance (execution speed) and memory conservation. See: Rust, Go, Julia, Nim, Swift.
• Focus on safety and concurrency. See Rust, Swift, Go.
• More features from functional programming languages are being adopted to reduce side-effects such as immutable variables (at least optionally or by default as in Rust).
• “Composition over inheritance” – See Rust (no inheritance, all composition), Go (no inheritance, all composition), Julia

The languages being explored, not all are new:

• Rust
• Go
• Julia
• Nim
• Swift
• Elixer (purely functional)
• Clojure (purely functional)

The only thing I find missing is a focus on expressiveness. I would like to see some benchmarks that includes expressiveness as a metric. I really like Ruby because of it’s expressiveness. I am not a fan of purely functional languages but I like the idea of making functional concepts the default with optional ways to override when necessary, as Rust uses. I may try to come up with a benchmark to illustrate this issue. Mostly I think of this as a problem with large (think approximately 1GB in size) immutable arrays undergoing calculations. Plus, for loops with a variable for the current index or value is a pretty handy feature. I don’t prefer recursion as an alternative.

Links

• Some benchmarks of different languages
• The most promising languages of 2016
• The most promising languages of 2015 – Part 1 (Note: this is quite a similar list of changes in these new languages that I read after writing the above. I could have saved time just pointing to this.)

Like many developers I come across Stack Overflow pages with some frequency when performing research. I came across a question to which I had an answer and I decided to was time to try and contribute. Well, my answer was deleted, and then the question was deleted, and at no time did I get any information or feedback as to what was happening or why. This is poor user interface design. Though it may take some effort, it should be clear to users what is happening and why when they attempt to use a site. It only took one google query to find that my experience is hardly unique:

• The decline of Stack Overflow (2015 Jul) – This has a long list of similar articles at the end of the article.
• Why I refuse to use stackoverflow (2014 Sep-Dec) – This is missing from the above links and contains several stories.
• Why I no Longer Contribute to StackOverflow (2013 Dec) – This is in the above list but does a better job suggesting *why* Stack Overflow is problematic.

I wonder if most websites simply have a lifespan that plays itself out. This could be good as it would suggest that there is an evolutionary aspect to software. Stack Overflow successfully displaced the sites that came before it by doing what it does better, and something will come along and replace Stack Overflow and the sites occupying that niche now when a better design and implementation are presented. Maybe that next thing will work better for me. Or maybe this niche is just not something that I will interact with, and that’s fine too.