There are characters in me who do not talk to each other who fill each other with grief who have never dined at the same table
[…] but I with all o

Following the programming language evolution, and taking it personally

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2022-01-13 19:00:20

There are characters in me who do not talk to each other who fill each other with grief who have never dined at the same table […] but I with all of my characters go on caring for you — Garous Abdolmalekian, as heard on The Slowdown, ep. 395

I deeply believe in language's evolution that is unstoppable, inevitable, and perpetual. Be it the human language or programming language—all the same.

However, this is not a universally accepted truth in many programming language communities. Especially for mature, widely-used languages like Java, Python, Ruby, and especially when the language is considered good by its users (unlike old PHP or old JS), many syntax/API changes are frowned upon. Improving the implementation? Yes, everybody wants it faster, more stable, support more platforms; also, concurrency. But changing the language? What for? The language was already good three (four, five) versions ago; every new syntax is just an unnecessary syntactic sugar!

That’s not how I see it. With years, I understood my main motive for writing the changelogs for Ruby: to put changes in the context, to try explaining how they logically follow from existing language intuitions, and how they invoke the urge for the next changes.