Creation vs. Evolution

Consider the history of Elixir: first you take Erlang, which was invented by Joe Armstrong and team to solve the extraordinary concurrency challenges that telecommunications imposes. You battle test it for many years. Then you take José Valim and team, who come in and create Elixir with the sole goal of making it more ergonomic by borrowing heavily from one of the most ergonomic languages of all time.

Like, of course you end up with something special that’s a joy to use.

Languages like Elixir and Ruby are an act of creation. Ruby, for example, reduces to a creator and designer (Matz). You can feel His embrace from first contact with the language. It is welcoming. It is warm. Things feel purposeful. They make sense. Ruby’s principle of least surprise makes everything feel in order.

JavaScript is exactly the opposite. JavaScript is evolution. Node is full of surprises, at every turn, for every skill level. JavaScript will always find little ways to undermine you, to humiliate you. There is no one designer, just the cold force of natural selection. It is riddled with arcane evolutionary quirks. It is direct democracy, the people’s language, for better and worse…

https://acco.io/i-escaped-node

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