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šŸ¤” what are the consequences of a language being ā€œlovedā€ does it attract a different kind of developer? Inspire different kinds of projects? And same question for unloved languages… (PHP?)
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Rust has an est 600k developers & recently won the most loved programming language on Stack Overflow for the 6th yr in a row. In a world of talent scarcity, one of the most brilliant moves of Solana was to build on top of the most beloved language with an established community.
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loved: actively fun to write unloved: actively annoying to write if developers are writing in an annoying language at their current job, you can tempt them to come work for you by using a more fun-to-write language basically a perk
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Not true in my experience. The best people care a lot, they just don’t let it stop or limit what they do, and use tools they dislike if necessary. Having weak opinions and taste in tools generally indicates a lower value commodity talent.
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The list of "loved" languages is interesting Less esoteric than I expected, although clojure or julia or elixir are going to cut your talent pools significantly. If anybody claims to not love Rust the Evangelical Joint Strike Force launches a hellfire missile at them.
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PL cultures attract extremely different makers via narrative compatibility. Rust is new enough to mostly be a ā€œvoluntary languageā€ for its adherents. Compare minivan people to sportscar people — both rational choices borne of differing value systems.
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Using a "loved" language (like Haskell, Rust, Scala) introduces the risk that a project will be harder to maintain long-term. It will forever be harder to hire developers who know that language, and it's more likely that the language will fall out of support over time.
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Ruby would be the case study for this. The loved nature of the language was critical to its role in the Rails era, and The Poignant Guide was an exemplar amongst loved language books.
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