zlacker

>>lumpa+(OP)
I don't want a community - I want a programming language. Preferably one that doesn't throw away billions of lines of existing code just because.

>>musica+ji1
There are countless dead programming languages without communities you can pick then.

>>doesnt+Ri1
Ruby and Perl are great examples of massively popular languages that withered because the language/platform outpaced the community.

If the first question you’re asking yourself looking at a code base is “what version is this/do I know this version” then that language is not facilitating you.

The successful languages are ones where “the community” prioritises backward compatibility. Java, C, Python have backward compatibility spanning decades. There’s a few discontinuities (lambdas in Java 8, Python 3, C++) but in most cases there’s a clear mapping back to the original. Python 3 is an exception to this but the migration window was something like 15 years…

Busy engineers, scientists and academics have little interest in keeping up to date with language features. A computer and a programming language are a tool for a job and the source code is just an intermediate artifact. These are your “community”, and the stakeholders in your success.

>>rusk+Tj1
Perl have almost perfect backward compatibility, but small community and bad renown are not so good.

>>melago+so1
Isn’t the actual “platform” itself fragmented these days? Different language versions, different libraries, different “engine”?

I dunno it was 20 years ago I jumped ship when they tried shoehorning object oriented semantics into it. Eugh.

>>rusk+xs1
I do not really know which event you mentioned. But if you use the current version of perl interpreter. It still work for most of old versions. And new features keep safe for old perl.