[ajross]

Ruby has massive adoption, as do Python and Perl and PHP. Environments with objectively better performance like the JVM and .NET have not, in fact, done all that well comparatively in this environment (which is to say they've done fine too and achieved "massive" adoption, just not that much better than their slower competitors).

In fact, looking at the market as it stands right now I'd say that performance concerns are almost entirely uncorrelated with programming environment adoption.

[yxhuvud]

Considering the massive speed improvements we have been seeing in Javascript, but also languages like Ruby, I'd say compilers is a solved problem for staticly compiled languages, but perhaps not as much for interpreted highly expressive languages.

[abecedarius]

Sort of. Lisp had a good combo of expressiveness and speed in the 80s, but it reached that point on the efficiency frontier by different techniques, like heavier use of macros. The newer techniques like trace compilation can make life even better, but the language design decisions in Ruby/Python/etc. that made that sort of thing necessary if you want speed, they didn't really pay for themselves from the perspective of smug Lisp weenies like me who were happy enough with our language and just wanted pragmatics like libraries.

[sklogic]

Did you just call Javascript a "highly expressive" language? Really?!?

[pizlonator]

LOL! It is expressive though. It's got really powerful first-class functions. It's got classes. It's got prototypes. It's got generators. It's got other things that I don't even remember (but will probably have to learn, to implement them, make them fast, and then fix the bugs).

I actually think that the reason why JS is so odd is that it is so expressive. That tends to happen with kitchen sink languages like C++.

Relevant: "There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses."

[raattgift]

Cool. "We took a dynamic language and made it fast(er again)".

And you're gonna apply that to the darkest corners of ES6? Whee, language theory nerd paradise!

I can't wait for the compilers targeting that using all sorts of really odd idioms that in effect work like fuzz testing.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

[sklogic]

More expressive than a less imaginative subset of C. More expressive than assembler. Much less expressive than any decent high-level language.

Javascript is low level, primitive and clumsy. There is absolutely no excuse for it being so crappy.

If you still think it is "expressive", you never seen an expressive language.

[pcwalton]

> If you still think it is "expressive", you never seen an expressive language.

Are you aware who Filip Pizlo is?

[sklogic]

Of course - a low level guy. It is quite likely that he is either not exposed at all to any expressive languages or reject them out of ideological reasons (JikesRVM is quite a strong symptom of the latter case).