[stevekemp]

Things like Zig, D, Odin, Rust, etc, are outliers. Most new programming languages are used only by their creators.

It's hard for a new language to find its feet, and make a name for itself. Unless its created by a big company with a lot of clout and internal users. (e.g. Rust, Go).

People keep creating new languages because it's educational, interesting, and sometimes even fun. Doesn't mean they'll get used, and it doesn't mean they're pointless.

Of course you learn very little if you make an LLM write the damn thing. But that's a different story.

[phplovesong]

There is gleam that is popular, and not backed by a huge company. Then there is also lisette for Go, thats very similar but targets Go instead of the beam.

New languages have space, and its just stupid "to stick to the only one i ever tried", then you just end like a PHP dev who just refuses to learn anything other than PHP.

[stevekemp]

For sure, learning new languages is helpful even if you don't use them. But that said there's also a significant difference between playing with new/toy languages for fun, and using them in production.

Trying to hire Haskal programmers to keep your product alive will be significantly more effort than finding a C, Go, Java, Rust, or similar programmer instead.

I like languages, I explore lots of them, but at work I stick to "obvious" choices because colleagues use them, know them, and it fits into the shared infrastrcture. It's okay to introduce new things, but it requires buy-in, and persuasion. Not just one dev saying "That new CLI we wanted? I started in Racket/Odin/Wren/Lua/whatever."