Why I Hate Programming Language Advocacy (2000)
The reality is that popularity is hugely important for programming languages. Tooling is important, but you&#x27;ll only get good tool support if you&#x27;re popular; there are what, two and a half full IDEs out there, and at least for certain kinds of languages, having first-class support in those IDEs is a much bigger difference maker than anything you can do at an actual language design level. Similarly for things like having big hosted repositories with lots of libraries available, and first-class support in official SDKs.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I wish programming language competition was less zero-sum than it is, but sticking our heads in the sand about it doesn&#x27;t help.