Came across this (old but still relevant I think?)...

# feed

[mbonnin]

Came across this (old but still relevant I think?) video the other day, asking a good question and mentioning Kotlin a bunch of times.
Disclaimer: it's not 100% Kotlin but gives an interesting point of view of functional programming and the ecosystem in general.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyJZzq0v7Z4&t=2046s▾

[Charles Flynn]

It was a well delivered talk but I'm not sure I agree with his central premise of the reason for the top 10s popularity of "it was either by chance or some external feature such as killer app or marketing and nothing to do with the language itself".

Sure the things he mentioned will have had an impact but he does a disservice to the languages themselves and doesn't point out the failings of "purely functional" languages. He said 0 of that list are functional whereas I think a number of them (kotlin included) can claim to be so from a practicality point of view.

I love Haskell for instance but I wouldn't really dream of using it in a business context for a number of reasons. And a number of its issues around lack of ecosystem etc ultimately come back to the language itself frankly having a very high learning curve.

His basic point was "if JavaScript was instead written as Haskell then Haskell would be number 1 today" and I seriously doubt that would be the case.

[Oliver.O]

A promotional talk. Too much argument cherry-picking to be useful. Too many beliefs on a purely abstract level, without considering actual use cases.