[masak]

So, I've been thinking about this comment a lot over the weekend.

It is interesting to consider a "cool kids" demographic, of developers who stray far enough outside of the mainstream to find small but worthy languages. These would include Scala, Haskell, Kotlin, Clojure, Racket, and Rust. (Plus anyone's favorite non-mainstream language, which I in my haste totally forgot!)

Earlier this year I found that, at a rough approximation, language mind-share in 2020 consists of 25% Java, 25% JavaScript, 25% Python, and 25% everything else. (My source for that is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og847HVwRSI -- and I'm sure there are any number of possible objections against those numbers... but I think my point holds even if they're several percentage points off.) We live in the strongest language oligoculture since FORTRAN and COBOL in the 1960s. These top three languages, and their communities, act as strong attractors. People flock around these languages because they're popular and established.

Despite that, I'm hopeful. I think there's room for experimentation and playfulness. I think evolution in programming languages is still happening, and that solid/interesting ideas are coming mostly from that fringe, not from the established languages.

Both Arc and Bel have a decidedly hobbyist feel. Maybe that's why they are not drawing large crowds. I think the target audience consists of people who like to "sketch in code" and whip something up in 10 minutes using a REPL and highly interactive development rather than something heavyweight and serious-feeling. A language that "sparkles joy" a little bit, where easy things feel easy. And I don't think it's too late for that, or that the fringe has run out of room for such language attempts.