[salmo]

I couldn’t agree with this more.

To me, there’s an ecosystem and a culture for a language in a situation.

The ecosystem is the tooling around the language. Debugging, performance profiling, building and dependency management are examples.

The culture is how the language is used in real life. How stable is the ecosystem?

There are lots of beautiful languages that are used horrifically. Enterprise OOP is an example for me where more than half the code is dedicated to avoiding basic principles for “what if we want to change later” (looking at you getters and setters).

And within a company or software suite, there can be subcultures of how “we” use the language. Every class needs an interface. Our C is written OO (see old GNOME).

For the ecosystem you have extremes. C where debugging and performance profiling are well defined practice, but modern dependency management doesn’t exit. The JavaScript ecosystem changes so rapidly, documentation is usually out of date, “nobody does that anymore”, etc.

And so much awful comes from trying to force a language into something the language wasn’t originally designed or even used for. Your Haskell example here. Adding functional language features and convoluted asynch to every freaking language is another. People create things much harder to learn than a new language with a mature ecosystem and culture in a domain just to avoid “learning a new language.”

In woodworking, I can do pretty much anything with a chisel. But I plane with a plane, saw with a saw, use specialty planes for rabbets, etc. Each has a learning curve, but I’ll end up with a better, more consistent result. And really, they’re all just chisels with jigs in different configurations. But I’m going to use a chisel where it’s still best, like mortising. Well, and where I’m not sure I want to invest in a more specialized tool yet and risk my wife killing me. Then I use C… I mean, a chisel.