[t_scytale]

There is absolutely no evidence to support this assertion.

Instead there is plenty of evidence that currently there is a lot innovation in all niches of the programming ecosystem - from low level [Rust] to high level, and a lot of coder interest in all the options.

Also talking about "lowest common denominator" comes across as somewhat snobby - many world-class coders use high-level languages when appropriate. It's a matter of choosing the right tool for the job, not dumbing down.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> There is absolutely no evidence to support this assertion.

Consider the popularity of Javascript and Electron for Desktop applications.

[ssokolow]

I think that's more a function of "We want to access all demographics without paying to properly comply with the interface design guidelines of each platform individually. What 'write once, run everywhere including the browser' solution have you got for us?"

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

That wouldn't explain why even companies like Microsoft use webtech in their OS configuration GUI these days.

[ssokolow]

Good point. It's probably fundamentally a cost-cutting measure in both cases, where Microsoft just found it cheaper and easier for similar reasons.

(eg. Win32 isn't a convenient API, Qt has license fees while Electron does not, Microsoft has a history of making successor APIs that even they don't have proper confidence in, etc.)

[bastawhiz]

And yet much of Google was built with Python for a very significant chunk of its life. Netflix and Uber were/are heavily leveraging JavaScript for core workloads. The machine learning ecosystem is largely dominated by Python. Stripe, GitHub, and Shopify are still investing heavily in Ruby. Almost none of this is/was for the sake of accessibility to beginners.

Your example cherry picks exactly one instance, ignoring the context of that choice. Such an assertion requires more than just anecdotal musings and ignores the tradeoffs that those teams made when choosing a platform.

[Spivak]

Because it’s a first class development experience, cross-platform by default, V8 is really really fast, and toolkits that support “build your own toolkit” are non-existent outside the web.

I don’t want to make a “Windows app”, “A Mac app”, or a “QT app”. I want a rectangle and a high-level enough interface to build my own widgets. People who are single mode users obviously hate that every app looks and behaves different but most people are multi-mode and don’t care.

JS is only easy at the most superficial level and gets to be a mess once you go beyond small apps.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> Because it’s a first class development experience [...]

I'm going to have to disagree with that.

> People who are single mode users obviously hate that every app looks and behaves different but most people are multi-mode and don’t care.

I am going to have to strongly disagree with that. If that were true nobody would ever have wanted to do theming, which was a big deal before developers forgot how to make software flexible enough to support it.

> JS is only easy at the most superficial level and gets to be a mess once you go beyond small apps.

Oh, you mean like BASIC? A language designed specifically to be easy to learn? Lots of applications were made in BASIC because it was easy to get into and people just kinda dealt with the mess. Visual Basic especially has a reputation. Sound familiar?

[johnisgood]

> It's a matter of choosing the right tool for the job, not dumbing down.

In some cases, but there is definitely a trend of dumbing down stuff in the name of accessibility or ease of use. As long as the GUI does not limit me and I can still tinker with various stuff under, say, "Advanced", I am okay-ish.