We are forking D

[H. S. Teoh]

On Mon, Jan 08, 2024 at 05:27:09PM +0000, Dukc via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Sunday, 7 January 2024 at 21:16:46 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > As somebody has said, it depends on your definition of "success".
[...]
> I think a good definition of success is `popularity *
> (yourLanguage.technicalMerit - replacedLanguage.technicalMerit)`. No
> matter how popular a language is, if it isn't better than what it
> replaces it can't be considered a success. If it is outright worse
> than the old ones, it's actually a bad thing for it to gain
> popularity.
[...]

The thing is, arbitrary definitions like this miss the point that
success in its literal sense means you achieved the goal(s) you set out
to accomplish. As such, what constitutes success depends on what your
goals are in the first place. If the goals are unclear or unknown, then
success is strictly speaking undefined.  And since the definition of
success depends on its goals, if two languages have two different goals
then you can't really compare their respective "successes", because
that's just comparing apples and oranges.

Furthermore, what the *user* considers as success may not be the same as
what the author considers as success -- because their respective goals
differ. If the language author's goal is a language that can express the
kind of complex tasks he wishes to program, then he might consider it a
success once the language has reached that level of expressivity. But if
a user's goal is to use a popular language, then he may not agree on
this "success".

tl;dr: "success" is often a squirrely word, used more for self-praise or
criticism rather than an objective measure of a language.


T

-- 
You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely. -- azephrahel