This will happen at a certain point anyway. The current fashion- and inertia-driven nature of IT is not sustainable in the long term. Tons of money are poured on very questionable projects, all the time.
Plus we have a lot of pretty awesome languages that are mature enough and are serving very different niches (so their union can cover everything in IT) like Rust, Erlang/Elixir, Zig, OCaml (which can be transpiled to two JS variants, BuckleScript and ReasonML), TypeScript, and probably 20+ others.
Not to derail the thread but the dependency on very slow and hard-to-debug dynamic languages like Ruby and Python is getting out of hand.
Statements like "But it's easier to find devs for Python and Ruby than it is for Rust and Elixir" might be statistically correct now but that means nothing. People change technologies as market demands change so I am absolutely not worried about displaced programmers. There's almost no such thing as displaced programmers either, 99% of all my acquaintances just learned the new tech their employer wanted from them and moved on to the next stable paycheck.
Only if you are convinced there is a fundamental need for more manpower for code written in faster languages. For me personally, Crystal was the language that convinced me that great dev UX and productivity is possible in compiled languages. As far as I'm concerned, it even beats Ruby in both. YMMV.
So... are you saying people are going to have more kids because we stop using Python?
For equal numbers of humans, all those energy/environmental costs you mention are going to be there regardless of which programming language is used...
Plus we have a lot of pretty awesome languages that are mature enough and are serving very different niches (so their union can cover everything in IT) like Rust, Erlang/Elixir, Zig, OCaml (which can be transpiled to two JS variants, BuckleScript and ReasonML), TypeScript, and probably 20+ others.
Not to derail the thread but the dependency on very slow and hard-to-debug dynamic languages like Ruby and Python is getting out of hand.
Statements like "But it's easier to find devs for Python and Ruby than it is for Rust and Elixir" might be statistically correct now but that means nothing. People change technologies as market demands change so I am absolutely not worried about displaced programmers. There's almost no such thing as displaced programmers either, 99% of all my acquaintances just learned the new tech their employer wanted from them and moved on to the next stable paycheck.