+++
title = "Things I Learnt The Hard Way - A Language Is Much More Than A Language"
date = 2019-06-24
[taxonomies]
tags = ["en-au", "books", "things i learnt", "languages", "community", "ecosystem"]
+++
Picking a programming language is much more than just picking the words that
will generate a code. They come with a community, a leadership, an ecosystem
and a thread the binds them all together.
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Programming languages, in essence, are simply a bunch of keywords that make
things "go". But besides those keywords, they also bring their community, the
way the leaders deal with the community, the tools created by the leaders or
community to deal with the minutiae of creating a system, the way those tools
interact with each other, and a lot more.
While a language may have a simple syntax, it may be that the ones controlling
the language actually don't give two shits -- if you pardon my French -- to
the community. They focus on solving _their_ problems, not the community
problems[^1].
Or maybe the community has duplicate tools -- which is not a problem -- but
that developers of each tool don't talk to each other. Or worse: They simply
refuse to look what other tools are doing, which could be used to improve
their own[^2].
And maybe that third language is not as simple as others, but the leadership
is always discussing things with the community, being transparent on their
decision, allowing the community to discuss the future of the language and
even different groups building tools decided to merge efforts to give the
community better tools.
That's why you can't "pick" a language by its syntax alone. That's only the
surface of what the whole of a language encapsulates and if you ignore the
other elements in it, you may find yourself with a cute language in a
community that is always fighting and never going forward.
And picking a language for something _above_ the syntax is even worse.
[^1]: Yes, this is common, even in larger communities. And yes, I've seen the
leadership ignoring requests from the community and, sometimes, just
ignoring all the hard work the community did to supply the missing bits
because they didn't like it.
[^2]: Again, I've seen this before: There was a language that didn't come with
a build tool bundled. The community created a tool, which was widely
adopted. Later, a new build tool appeared and, in one of the notes, the
author of the new tool mentioned a feature. The community came and asked
"The previous build tool did something like that, what's the difference
between that and your tool?" And the answer was "I never used the first
tool." So, basically, the community ignored whatever the community was
using.
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