But for some reason, language designers are typically solo hackers. They require a combination of design skills and technical chops. Programming languages are undoubtedly hard to make. But spend a few minutes on any programming forum, and it’ll become clear that a lack of enthusiasm and opinions on languages could not be the reason why we don’t see more programming languages. Or that our languages today are sufficient and everyone is happy. One answer could be that programmers are not that interested in thinking about languages. On the other hand, if we think about languages as mediums of expression, choosing a language becomes less about objective qualities and more about aesthetics and ergonomics.īut if languages are tools, shouldn't we see many more language variations to cover the ever-increasings niches that software is entering? Similarly, if languages are mediums of thought, and there are more and more people interested in expressing themselves digitally, shouldn't we expect to see many more types of languages? Whereas, if I'm making a UI, I might want to use JavaScript for its first-class support for event-driven programming. For example, if I want to build a web server with reliable performance, I might use Golang because it has a solid standard library and concurrency primitives. If languages are indeed tools, then some languages would be better than others for a given task. We can think of a programming language as either a tool built to be good at a software domain or as a medium for thought and expression. Given how fast software is growing, shouldn’t we see more innovation in programming languages? We were, however, surprised by how slow-moving the programming language space seems to be. We’ve grown a community that, like us, is excited by languages. We built to make it easy to explore and learn languages and programming paradigms. UPDATE: The jam registration is now open.

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