D vs Go on reddit

[bearophile]

Walter:

> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fdqdn/google_go_just_got_major_win32_treats_now/c1f62a0

If a person looks at the history of computer languages, she sees thousands of languages. Many of them were lot of work to be created, and most of them have failed, over and over again. This has happened even to languages better than many other languages present at their time, and when you see this you get sad.

And then there are language extensions / modifications. Researchers and students have created hundreds of extensions to the C and Java languages, but most of those extensions are forgotten, lot of wasted work.

Few of the failed languages, like Algol, have given part of their ideas to successive languages that have succeed.

Some languages aren't meant to become widespread, they are just research toys. Despite they usually die quickly, later some of their ideas find their place in more widespread languages like Java, Haskell, OCaML, Scala, etc, so sometimes that work is not wasted.

Designing a new language is a bet, the success probability is quite low. Even if the language is good and it's backed by a strong firm, the probability of failure is very real.

Software is an important part of our planetary civilization, and even small improvements in creating it are able to influence society. So despite all, designing a good new language is a lot of fun and it's very hard, and even if it's a low probability bet, it's worth doing it.

Language designers usually create more than one language in their life, and sometimes they design many languages. So even if the success probability is low, trying again and again sometimes gives them a positive result :-) A good language designer is more important than the design of a single language.

Bye,
bearophile