| > I don't care at all what the syntax is I'm pretty sure, if the user experience of coding in a language is bad enough, that you wouldn't use said language, no matter how interesting it is design-wise. There's a threshold below which most programmers would rather reimplement the cool design features in a different language with better syntax than use the original language. Does anyone write in APL? No; it's basically impossible, given the syntax requires characters that aren't on your keyboard. But maybe you write in J. Or, more likely, you use a vector-operations/dataframe library in some arbitrary language. Do people write in Erlang? Well, some do; but many others think that connecting expressions with semicolons and commas is too painful to want to deal with (though not me; I enjoy "systems Prolog.") And some of those people got together to design Elixir, so they could use the Erlang runtime without having to write Erlang. Does anyone voluntarily pick up IBM JCL these days? Or COBOL? RPG? MUMPS? These archaic 1970s languages all have interesting design choices — heck, MUMPS assumes a database as part of the language runtime! — but they're just too awful to actually write in. It's far easier to just read about these languages as historical artefacts, and then implement their good ideas into a new language, than to actually use them. Does anyone use FORTRAN? Well, yes, if they have to, to extend OpenBLAS with something. But mostly as little as possible. And there are fewer reasons to do so these days, with e.g. cuBLAS not being written in FORTRAN. You put a syntax example on the home-page not to impress people with how cool your language looks; but rather, to show that you're not trying to bait-and-switch a prospective developer, by talking them into using a language by describing its cool features, only to reveal at the last moment that the syntax is awful. |