[pjmlp]

We actually already have enough safe languages as well.

I am a firm beliver in the vision of Xerox PARC for computing, and think the only reason we aren't yet there are politics, lack of funding from management for doing the right thing pushing them into the market, always looking to shareholders and the next quarter, and naturally programming language religion.

We were already on the right direction with languages like Modula-3 and Active Oberon, following up on Cedar influences, unfortunately that isn't how the industry goes.

[pron]

But software isn't developed for its own sake. It's built to serve some purpose, and it's through its purpose(s) that the selection pressures work. It's like Betamax fans saying that people were wrong to want a longer recording time than better picture quality. It's not enough to say that you like some approach better or to even claim that some untaken path would yield a more desirable outcome. You need to show that it actually works in the real world, with all of its complex variables. For example, in the nineties I worked on safety-critical software in Ada, but we ended up dumping it in favour of C++. It's not because we didn't recognise Ada's advantages, but because, in addition to those advantages over C++, it also had some very significant disadvantages, and in the end C++ allowed us to do what we were supposed to do better. Ada's build times alone made it so that we could write and run fewer tests, which hurt the software correctness overall more than it helped. We also ended up spending more time understanding the intricacies of the language, leaving us less time to think about the algorithm.

[pjmlp]

Ada was impacted by the tooling price and high demands on developer workstations.

Rational started as a company selling Ada Machines, that didn't had such issues with compilation times, but again goes down to reasons I listed why mainstream keeps ignoring such tools until finally governments are stepping in.

[ksec]

> vision of Xerox PARC for computing

What is that in relation to Zig and memory safety? Am I missing some context?

[pjmlp]

Smalltalk, Interlisp-D, and Mesa/Cedar as the languages for full graphical workstations.

Instead we got UNIX and C.

[pron]

We also got Java and Python (and VB for a while), which means there is no intrinsic, irrational bias against those approaches. A romantic view of those languages tends to ignore their serious shortcomings at the time they were presented. It's like claiming the market was irrational when it preferred VHS to Betamax despite the latter's better quality, while neglecting to mention it had a worse recording time, which mattered more to more people. When compating two things, it's not enough to mention the areas where X is better than Y; you also need to consider those where X is worse.

[pjmlp]

Yes we did, and unfortunately all of them have done design mistakes that keep to this day trying to fix.

Had Java actually been designed for where it stands today, instead for set top boxes and browser applets, retrofitting the value types, AOT compilation and low level capabilities already available in Modula-3 and Eiffel wouldn't be such an engineering feat that is already on 15 years mark.

Interestingly enough, value classes approach remind very much how expanded classes work in Eiffel.

Likewise money keeps being burned into making industry adopt a JIT compiler into CPython, which they could have been enjoying with Smalltalk and Lisp.

[pron]

Smalltalk had design mistakes aplenty. Comparing the downsides of the languages you like less with the upsides of the languages you like more is not a great way to understand why things are done the way they're done. Usually, it's not because people chose the worse options, but because each option has pros and cons, and at the time a choice is made, the chosen option's balance of pros and cons was more suitable to people's needs than the alternatives.

It may sometimes be the case that we say, oh, that particular feature of some unchosen language can be very useful for us now, but that is something very different from we should have chosen that other language - with all its pros and cons - back then.