Sat Jun 07 09:03:56 AM +08 2025 #44 ✎

Still, the history of mainstream programming languages is essentially a story of programmers vocally and emphatically rejecting what eventually proved to be some of the most incredibly successful innovations in the history of the field. Assembly programmers largely laughed at FORTRAN, but just a few decades later, there were nevertheless very few remaining assembly programmers. First-class functions were widely derided as needlessly complicated and confusing until programmers were forced to finally take the time to learn to use them once JavaScript became a load-bearing language by historical accident, and within a decade, they became a required feature for every major programming system. Sophisticated type systems largely retain a perception of overengineered, ivory-tower elitism, but many of the programmers who hold those very opinions have enthusiastically adopted Rust, a language that features a type system so complex that idiomatic Rust code can easily put Haskell programs to shame.