[hackuser]

> 10 minutes watching new users code in Rust will give you better ideas than 10 weeks thinking about the problem in your head.

I'd add: Do you want to focus on new or experienced users? For example, when implementing systems that will be used 8 hrs/day by its users, we look only at efficiency for experienced users (unless the political situation requires placating the noobs). They will be noobs for a day or maybe a couple weeks; they'll be experienced all day, every day for years. We explain it that way at the beginning and they thank us later.

An example many are familiar with is Vim: Steep learning curve, but I'm so happy that the focus is on efficiency for veteran users.

[lemming]

This is the reasoning that is used for Clojure - "Clojure is for experts". It's used to rationalise all sorts of design choices that make the language much harder to get started with than (IMO of course) it should be.

If you're implementing a system that users have to use for their job, they'll put up with whatever they have to while they're learning it. If you're implementing a programming language and you want to increase adoption and general user friendliness, I think this is a terrible choice.

I love Clojure now and I work with it every day, but it's still frustratingly hard for avoidable reasons even though I'm a pretty advanced user. I'm jealous of the attention that Rust, Elm and Elixir pay to this aspect of language design, and I'm very pleased to see languages taking it more seriously.

[sambe]

I guess the optimum has to be some kind of "area under the learning curve" but I think it's pretty clear if you made a binary choice optimising for people who already made the effort makes a lot more sense. Is Clojure really that bad? I don't know it, but I never had the impression there was an anti-newbie community. Sometimes people take these binary positions as a decision-making optimisation too; having that policy just simplifies a lot of discussions, perhaps.

[throwaway7645]

Agreed. All of those were easier to deal with than Clojure, but that could just be because it is a pain to do anything with the JVM and emacs isn't easy either.

[nathancahill]

What's the language that takes that to the extreme? I remember it being used for fintech(?) or spreadsheets and I remember seeing one-liners that look like someone just mashed the keyboard. Apparently incredibly efficient once you are an expert in the language.

[throwaway7645]

The APL family of languages that currently have commercial implementations like Dyalog and Q w/ kdb+ database. J and GNU APL are both free & open source. Dyalog is nice though even though a commercial license sets you back a grand per year (basically what most C# users pay for VS). You get a nice interpreter, support, built-in graphics, full .NET interop, full R interop, heck even DDE which is still useful in finance and my own industry. They seem to take documentation really seriously and have pretty interesting conferences. I don't code in APL, but am considering it as their product just seems pretty agile for my needs (personal user productivity). Q is extremely expensive and is the APL derived language that accompanies the kdb+ database used for time-series analysis on stock quotes...etc. It was built by Arthur Whitney and legend has it the entire source code is 5 pages of C (being an APL guy he has it all scrunched up though...doesn't like to scroll). People seem to like it and be willing to pay a fortune.

[mickronome]

That would probably be Q used in kdb+, and J, which the previous response stated is an open source implementation of the same/very similar language. The terseness even visible in the language name.

[hyperpape]

Perhaps J, which is part of the APL family of languages.

[falcolas]

I think that you should focus on both groups. The new users for adoption, the advanced users for retention.

Even if no actual language changes come out of the new users group, just documentation updates, it would be a win for the entire ecosystem.

[coldtea]

>unless the political situation requires placating the noobs

If something is a pain point for the noobs it's usually a badly designed part of the language that the "veterans" have just learned by rote to step around.