[rednafi]

The appeal of experimenting with languages varies widely between academics and industrial practitioners. When you’re in the business of creating languages, exploration often takes on the character of an art project.

However, as a trench-line coder, I enjoy dabbling in languages to learn different techniques for achieving a similar set of goals without sacrificing pragmatism. In that sense, I rarely have the luxury to explore purely for exploration’s sake. So I wouldn’t describe abstraction, performance, or usability as “aesthetics,” nor would I spend time on a frivolous language that I know won’t gain much traction outside academia.

I like reading the perspectives of academics just to see how wildly different they are from those of the people I work with in the industry. This is probably a good thing.