[lelanthran]

> Language Design: Let's start with the admission that there's a lot of cargo culting in language design. Evidence is hard to come by and the best evidence is other languages that succeed with different choices.

You are going to get a lot of false positives using success as a metric for good language design.

I cannot think of a single popular language, other than Python, in the last 40 years that did not have huge companies with sizable marketing budgets behind them.

Programming languages do not succeed based on merit. They may fail based on lack of it.

[Supermancho]

> Programming languages do not succeed based on merit. They may fail based on lack of it.

Merit is what I'm talking about, in a way. The ability to use more robust forms of composition is a positive quality for a language. So much so, even if not explicitly stated, most languages have adopted new mechanisms over time beyond simple rigid inheritance trees.

[lelanthran]

> Merit is what I'm talking about, in a way. The ability to use more robust forms of composition is a positive quality for a language.

Maybe so, but what I am saying is that merit cannot make a language popular, but marketing can.

[pjmlp]

People keep telling this about Python, always ignoring who was paying Guido's salary.

[lelanthran]

> People keep telling this about Python, always ignoring who was paying Guido's salary.

Well, reveal the spoilers and don't keep us all in suspense :-)

Who was paying GvR a salary[1] when Python took off circa 2001/2002?

[1] I don't think paying a single person a salary is the same as the millions of dollars poured into marketing and development as done with all the other popular languages.

[pjmlp]

Zope was, which was one of the best ways to do CMS back in those days.