I’m starting to think that a big factor in what draws people to their favorite programming languages is a subjective sense of aesthetics

there’s definitely a cultural aspect: you learn to solve problems in your native programming language and it can be hard to solve those same problems in terms of a different language paradigm, or even a somewhat different language with limitations you’re not used to

but you can overcome that cultural gap with practice if you really want to. it’s kind of a slog but it’s not the worst or anything

but what makes people push through that slog in the first place? I think it’s an aesthetic attraction to the language. people see something beautiful in the language, off in the distance, and they want to learn it in order to reach that beauty and really understand it and appreciate it

so I suspect that’s what draws people to functional programming - I think it’s an aesthetic attraction to the idea of mixing code and math, or to immutability as a concept, or to declarative programming, or etc. there’s something about it that they find beautiful and alluring. that’s what gets them through the slog of learning it, and it’s why people end up sticking with that paradigm in the long term

I think that also explains why some people’s favorite language is still Java, for example. because that was probably the first language that they really clicked with on an aesthetic level and they still get that sense of beauty from the language. even though the culture of programming languages has changed since then and younger programmers probably consider Java ugly instead of beautiful, calling a language “ugly” is completely subjective and culture-dependent

just like it is to call Haskell “elegant” or “pure” or “beautiful”. I can’t understand what that means because my cultural concept of programming beauty is different from the one that Haskell programmers have. and if I tried to explain why I find Lua or Fennel beautiful or elegant, they would probably be equally confused

@kasdeya I kinda like Perl, and I think a big part of the reason is that it has this split between regex expressions which scarcely pretend to be comprehensible, and other language features which resemble natural language, like implied subjects and varying the placement of modifiers.

@foolishowl young kas tried learning Perl a long time ago, and I do remember really liking the concept of implied subjects. I feel like that could be a very expressive language feature if handled well