Am I the only one who's sick of seing "new revolutionary language" from google & co that solves absolutely nothing but is becoming trendy because of the company's name?

Got stuck with the job of managing the Kubernetes cluster, eh?

Google glass anyone? Google Wave?

I wonder if it's just my age but I do think that most of the new languages I've encountered recently - Dart, Swift, Kotlin - didn't really need to exist.

Existing languages can be fixed and updated. I'm not averse to change but none of them really make me think 'yeah, this has to be a new language, there's no way you could implement this in an existing one'.

On the plus side, the syntax battle has been won by C. Most of those languages basically adhere to it.

yeah you probably are, because most other people either full-on jump on the hype train, or don't even look in its direction.

@MM83 Swift and Kotlin are definitely of that kind "no way to implement in the existing language. Needs to be a new one".

There is very little that you can fix in an existing language. You almost always hit the backwards compatibility wall instantly.

Got stuck with the job of managing the Kubernetes cluster, eh?

One thing about google that I find just fucking annoys me is when I key in the correct name for somebody whose name isn't spelt in the normal way i.e. Jak Beanstalk. "Did you mean Jack Beanstalk?", without offering any search information for the name I originally entered. I know, First World Problems...

@Lensflare only if the sole alternative is “update ObjC or Java”, in which case yeah, you’re gonna hit problems and you’re already polishing a turd. But inventing an _entirely new_ language wasn’t the only alternative to that.

@MM83 not sure I understand. What alternative do you mean?

@Lensflare any established language, there are loads. Also, you can draw a line with legacy support. You don’t have to be backwards compatible forever.

@MorwinMahi Get off my lawn

@MM83 sure you can always use an established language. But then we would not make any progress.

And languages like Kotlin and Swift do provide a massive amount of improvements. It‘s really worth it learning them.

Regarding backwards compatibility, it depends. Some languages like Python (I think) do break compatibility with major release versions.

But I think it‘s the exception.

C++, Java, C# I‘m certain have never and will never break compatibility.

I know some special case with Swift, where it has been breaking compatibility in its earlier versions but then promised to not do it in the future.

And that‘s completely understandable. Personally, I don’t mind breaking changes all that much but I see how they can be a major pain in the butt and make the language look like a poor choice for that.