On Wednesday, 3 January 2018 at 09:56:48 UTC, Pjotr Prins wrote:
average ones. And D must be there. Similar to the Haskell and Lisp communities we have the luxury of dealing with the best programmers out there.
This attitude is toxic, and it isn't true either. Sure, Haskell might attract programmers who are more interested in math, but in practical programming formal math is only 1% of what you need (99% of your time is not spent on things that require deep understanding of math). I don't see any evidence of Lisp programmers being better than other programmers either.
Good programmers aren't stuck on any single language and will pick the tool best suited for the job at hand. Good programmers are also good at picking up new languages.
Hyped languages are for suckers.
Hype leads to critical mass, which leads to higher productivity because you get better tooling, better documentation (including stack overflow), better libraries and better portability.
But you don't need lots of users to get hype. You can focus on a narrow domain and be the "hyped language" within a single realm.
The only time where it is an advantage to be small is when your language design is changing. Once the language design is stable there is only disadvantages in not having critical mass.
