Hasnain says:

Great reflections on a software project and its evolution. Interesting even if you're not into Rust.

"Maybe you've nodded your head about one or two of the things above and think they're good ideas -- "hey, maybe we should have had a BDFL!" -- though more likely you think they're terrible. But the point of this post isn't just to lob a bunch of suggestions about direction at the current project, or grind a bunch of long-dull axes, or even to make myself look bad in public.

The point is to indicate thematic divergence. The priorities I had while working on the language are broadly not the revealed priorities of the community that's developed around the language in the years since, or even that were being-revealed in the years during. I would have traded performance and expressivity away for simplicity -- both end-user cognitive load and implementation simplicity in the compiler -- and by doing so I would have taken the language in a direction broadly opposed to where a lot of people wanted it to go."

Posted on 2023-07-07T04:45:22+0000