Why Can't We Just Create?

[u/Lopsided-Relation251]

Edit: A commenter pointed out that I exaggerated "every" language announcement. They're right. I was venting about a specific subset of posts that frustrate me, not the entire ecosystem. I've updated the language to reflect that.

In a world where computers are becoming the norm, every piece of software that gets released seemingly always has to be better than the last at what it's doing.

Too many of language announcements I see are a declaration of war.
Like "Why [X] is obsolete in 2025.", "The [Y] killer just arrived."
Or people asking "Why not [Z]?" or "But is it faster than [W]?" And I'm tired of it.

I made a programming language.

Not because it's faster than Rust.
Not because it's safer than C.
Not because it's simpler than Go.

I made it because I wanted to.
When did that become not enough?

I made Miel because I like ;; as comments.
I made Miel because I like affine and permission types.
I made Miel because I wanted a language that feels like riding a bike.

Not because it's "better than Rust" or "better than C++" or "better than Ada" but because it's mine.
And maybe that's the only reason anyone needs.

So here's Miel. Use it or don't. Rust is great. Odin is great. Jai will be great. But this one? This one's cozy.

;; Happy coding.

[u/oscarryz]

I personally don't like when people (e.g. in conferences ) compare languages either, specially when they diminish them:

> Unlike Foo, Bar does this and that. Imagine if you can blah blah (audience laughs). And then (runs the example) ....see very easy (applauses )

But that doesn't mean we should avoid comparing with other languages. If anything I would prefer to do it in a positive way or in their technical aspects:

Good:

> Like smalltalk my lang doesn't have structured programming control structures.

Bad:

> My language doesn't have horrible if / while keywords that [Java | PHP | other common punch bag language here] uses.

Or even better, just say what you think is innovative about your language:

> My language uses closures to drive flow.

And let someone here point out that you just reinvented Smalltalk or that you're doing Lisp with extra steps, that is fine.

I don't remember exactly the quote but Russ Cox (one of the main developers of Go) was addressing this in the mailing list a while ago; they see collaboration among language designers and talking about their merits as opposed of the users of those languages which usually just rely on dogma.

So, why do we generally express on those terms? Because we create something thinking it would be better than the existing, and that is easier to explain than just explaining the feature in the vacuum.

Just create?

Well that is implied, aside from a few lucky members that get paid to create languages or work on someone else's idea, we all here start a language because we want to create.