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by Dibes 2706 days ago
I'm not sure how what we used to do or wait for is relevant now. Technology and it's pace isn't the same as it was decades ago, and I see no reason that we should hold it to the standard of that time.
1 comments

>I'm not sure how what we used to do or wait for is relevant now.

Because whether a language is slow to evolve only makes sense relatively to some baseline rate.

>Technology and it's pace isn't the same as it was decades ago, and I see no reason that we should hold it to the standard of that time.

And yet still, today, popular languages take their time to get features like async/await. Python got it after 3.6 (so 20+ years on), JS only got it in 2017, C++ doesn't have it, Rust doesn't yet have it (it's coming), Java doesn't have it, C++ doesn't have it...

Heck, Golang doesn't have generics and comfortable error checking still...

It really is a language by language basis. Many languages adopt features insanely fast, many insanely slow. JS for example has as of late has a very fast rate of change[1]. Or you could look at how Java has changed from 8->10 and all the new features added there. There are other languages like C that haven't changed much at all (to my knowledge). It isn't relevant to take the rate of change of other languages and apply it to another as an expectation. You would get a better metric by taking the rate of change of the current language in the context of the last year or two.