Development quote of the week [LWN.net]

A better take is that, fair or not, popularity is not necessarily a good judge of what works well in a language. Language design requires skill and taste, and it is not obvious that the wisdom of the crowd extends that far.

— Steven D'Aprano

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Development quote of the week

Posted Feb 25, 2022 7:02 UTC (Fri) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

You really do need to be careful how far you take this philosophy. Otherwise, you end up with something like Lisp or Haskell, languages whose "obviously" superior design is frankly lost on the rest of us mere mortals. If your language has no popularity at all, then it's going to be a niche language at best - which is perhaps what you want, but perhaps not.

The wisdom of the crowd generally is quite good at identifying problems. It can be hit-or-miss at identifying solutions, especially solutions which have yet to be implemented and used in the real world.