I don’t find the core idea of this article (learning a language/syntax is hard but $subj) important to its reasoning. And there’s an issue with new languages that it doesn’t mention.
In my experience, learning a new syntax isn’t hard. The hard part is to become familiarized with the ecosystem, common methods, pitfalls, history, roadmap. To detect that the article you read is obsolete or fringe. To realize that there is a better/easier way. To become an actualized member of a community, even if read-only. Learning new syntax is nothing compared to that. You can learn a language in a few days. But you cannot become an efficient developer in it in less than a year.
All new languages have the same issue: their ecosystems are not well-established. They will lack features and documentation (out of PL’s scope itself) and they will evolve and break compatibility and their communities are small. We may need more programming languages, but not until we invent a way to just take pip, cpan, npm, etc and merge them automagically into that new PL. so that algorothms, libraries and frameworks could live outside of a language. Otherwise, all these new PLs are doomed to reinvent the wheel and repeat the mistakes.
In my experience, learning a new syntax isn’t hard. The hard part is to become familiarized with the ecosystem, common methods, pitfalls, history, roadmap. To detect that the article you read is obsolete or fringe. To realize that there is a better/easier way. To become an actualized member of a community, even if read-only. Learning new syntax is nothing compared to that. You can learn a language in a few days. But you cannot become an efficient developer in it in less than a year.
All new languages have the same issue: their ecosystems are not well-established. They will lack features and documentation (out of PL’s scope itself) and they will evolve and break compatibility and their communities are small. We may need more programming languages, but not until we invent a way to just take pip, cpan, npm, etc and merge them automagically into that new PL. so that algorothms, libraries and frameworks could live outside of a language. Otherwise, all these new PLs are doomed to reinvent the wheel and repeat the mistakes.