[klibertp]

> New languages can outweigh low popularity with lots of other important qualities [...] abundance of libraries, etc.

How?

> If the new language is easy to learn, that pretty much defeats the issue of low popularity all together!

If the language is easy to learn it's probably not worth learning. "Easy to learn" in most contexts and for most people means "similar" or "familiar".

Of course, there are languages truly easy to learn thanks to their small surface and internal consistency (like Erlang, PicoLisp, Forth...) but they are very rarely regarded as such.

> Again, Haskell might be a great language, but it's daunting to people who only have experience with C-like languages.

My opinion is that it's their problem, not Haskell's. Instead of "being daunted" they should go polyglot already and stop whining.

[smt88]

> > New languages can outweigh low popularity with lots of other important qualities [...] abundance of libraries, etc.

> How?

By "new" I didn't necessarily brand new. I meant something like Rust, Go, or Julia. They're more than 3 years old and relatively fully-baked, but they're much younger than the mainstream languages.

I don't know much about Julia, but in the Rust and Go communities, the early adopters are producing libraries for the not-so-early adopters. A good question would be, "Why?" I think the answers are: 1) fun, 2) because they want to get others to use the language, and 3) because their company has adopted the language in production.

So it does (and has to) happen. In this whole thread, I'm not talking about the decision-making process of an early adopter. I'm talking more about someone replacing a mainstream language in a production or business environment.

> "Easy to learn" in most contexts and for most people means "similar" or "familiar".

I meant "easy to learn" however you want to define that. Similar/familiar is fine, as it's definitely contributing to the popularity of Rust and Go. It really does hurt some excellent languages (e.g. OCaml) that they look so alien to mainstream, working programmers.

> My opinion is that it's their problem, not Haskell's

That's true. A language should have whatever syntax is most effective and not make the same mistakes that past languages made.

However, that's not the same thing as readability. A language can be totally different from C-family languages and still be readable. To mention OCaml again, I find it ridiculously hard to read because there are tiny, similar-looking characters that are significant all over the place. To my eye, significant dots and tildes are very hard to pick out when I'm scanning down a page.

So assuming Haskell is readable to a complete newbie, it isn't Haskell's problem that the syntax is new. But it is Haskell's problem if it can't overcome the catch-22 that people don't use a language if other people don't use it.

I'm glad we're talking about Haskell, because that community is very enthusiastic and has made some incredible, accessible Haskell resources to solve this problem. It may not be their problem, but they're still attacking it, as every language has to. It seems to me that the Rust community knows this and is going in the same direction with highly-accessible tutorials.

As for Go, the language is so small that it's "easy to learn" in terms of syntax, but the patterns and paradigms you use in Go might take longer as a result.

[klibertp]

> It really does hurt some excellent languages (e.g. OCaml) that they look so alien to mainstream, working programmers.

How will you explain a relative success of F#, then?

In my opinion "looking alien" is not important at all. To the mainstream real qualities are much less important than marketing; that's true in many areas and mainstream programming is not an exception. Given enough marketing, you can turn "alien syntax" into a perceived advantage relatively easily.

> To mention OCaml again, I find it ridiculously hard to read because there are tiny, similar-looking characters that are significant all over the place.

Have you seen J? I'll just paste a bit of code in it:

   join =: 1 : 0
    ((([:{.[:>{.),:[:([:<(>"0))"1[:{:[:1 2 0&|:[:>([:,u"0)#]) (pr y))
   )

Is it readable? I'm told that yes, it is. There are people who can read this mess just fine, no problems at all.

Readability is an artifact of familiarity and, in some cases, tooling. You can get used to reading (and writing) even the most "unreadable" of syntaxes. Ask a PERL programmer if she finds her language readable. Will she say "no"?

My point is: until readability is formally defined and we're able to measure it objectively it's utterly useless to talk about it.

> But it is Haskell's problem if it can't overcome the catch-22 that people don't use a language if other people don't use it.

Yes, but this problem cannot be solved with technical qualities alone. Was it possible we wouldn't use C, Java or JavaScript at all.

It's marketing and "killer use-cases" that matter. You want to use the same language your OS is written in, for example. Was Windows written in OCaml you'd use OCaml to write Windows programs. If there's a program you really like, which is scriptable in Lua, you will use Lua.

[smt88]

> My point is: until readability is formally defined and we're able to measure it objectively it's utterly useless to talk about it.

It's more defined than we, as programmers, pretend it is. There's research in cognitive psychology, linguistics, and lexicology that tells us that some things are easier for human brains to process than others.

For example, if you skim through a block of code, it's easier to pick out "&&" than it is to pick out "and". There are lots of rules like this.

This is partially because of the way humans read words. If yuo spel a bunhc of words wrng in a sentence in minor ways that don't alter the shapes too much, it's still very readable.

That's why your example of J is very hard to read (objectively, not relatively). If someone removed or altered a few of those symbols, no one would notice upon skimming it. It's ludicrous to argue that it's readable just because some people say it is (and I think they're just bragging to begin with).

[klibertp]

> There's research in cognitive psychology, linguistics, and lexicology that tells us that some things are easier for human brains to process than others.

I'm not convinced that such research controls for familiarity effects. Not to mention, programming languages have much richer syntaxes than natural languages. I think (suspect), in regard to PLs, what you're talking about (you mention "skimming" later) is actually legibility - ease of recognizing letters and words. Not readability, that is ease of understanding the meaning of what's written.

> For example, if you skim through a block of code, it's easier to pick out "&&" than it is to pick out "and".

Why? What if the rest of the line is similarly composed of punctuation? Are you sure in a line looking like this:

   >&.@:/"1\and[:    NB. some nonsensical J phrase

you'd have an easier time spotting the "and" were it written as "&&":

   >&.@:/"1\&&[:

> If someone removed or altered a few of those symbols, no one would notice upon skimming it.

Possibly, but we're not talking about "skimmability", but readability. Removing or altering a few characters in that line would result in an incorrect, nonsensical sentence and you'd notice it right away.

"Right away" is subjective, of course. I spent nearly an hour trying to read this damned thing when I attempted it for the first time. Every J phrase was a challenge then. It's still hard, but it got much easier with practice. The trick here is exactly the same as in your example:

> yuo spel a bunhc of words wrng

that is, once you learn how the words look like you can recognize them easily, even if they are a bit mangled.

> (and I think they're just bragging to begin with)

Yeah, I get the same feeling sometimes ;-)

But a human brain is great at pattern recognition. It has to be trained, and it's possible that some shapes are harder to learn to recognize than others, but once you learned them... is there really a difference?

Learning different PLs is my hobby, I've looked at ~80 languages to date and learned quite a chunk of them. Every single time I noticed this effect: once you internalize shapes of common phrases, you stop having trouble reading the code. It's much, much harder in some case (J is an abomination here - I'm trying to really learn it for the second year now and... it's not going that well) and easier in others (Smalltalk, Lisp, Forth, ...). But I strongly suspect every language, if studied and used enough, becomes readable.