If anything, in my eyes it's exactly because programming languages matter is the reason why we should have less of them. We should start folding some languages inside others. (Or abandon them.)
As a counterpoint, the programming industry is vast, so the opportunity cost of using tools that are not as good as they could be is also very high. If we don’t continue to explore new possibilities, how will we make those tools better? How can we learn what is worth keeping, what to combine, what to abandon?
I believe there is huge potential in finding better programming languages and better programming models for them to describe. We are still at the stage where we are worrying about whether our programs are even behaving correctly. Sometimes we get as far as worrying about performance. There is a lot of talk about productivity but it is relatively rare that we consider language design as a way of expressing our ideas more efficiently or making it easier for someone else to understand them later.
If we look at languages like Haskell or Erlang or Rust, these have certainly been used professionally, but in the long term their most important contribution might be the ideas they introduced to wider audiences rather than anything written in those languages themselves.
As a counter-counter point, I hear your sentiment a lot, I work for 22 years in the profession now -- and I am a fairly average programmer so I don't claim any credentials or anything.
...And I've never seen your sentiment work. Nobody is really learning anything, people just want to tinker with stuff and never read history or even best practices. All I see are people going in circles forever.
Maybe there's a smaller percentage of much clever programmers out there. I wouldn't know because I never (so far) attempted to do anything beyond web apps (though I do regret that a lot and might yet change it). And maybe these people are truly evolving the art. I mean we have Golang, Rust, WASM, and others so I know these people exist.
But somehow that almost never penetrates the broader programming community. Maybe Rust is the only true example because people started wanting to have sum types in their day-job languages -- which I view as a good thing. Such sentiments have the potential to gain enough critical mass to have language designers reconsider their initial choices (f.ex. Elixir is working on an optional type checker, one that's stricter and more descriptive and correct than the one coming with Erlang).
So I don't know. I wish you are correct but after 22 years in the sidelines the only true improvements I've seen are Elixir / Golang (in terms of transparent parallelism where Elixir wins over Golang but Golang is still much better than almost everything else out there as well) and Rust (for the aforementioned compile-time guarantees and other ones like memory safety).
Outside of that though? Nope. "Hey let's have one more JS framework, we didn't have a new one this month" is something I've seen a lot of, not to mention the eternally growing list LISP interpreters because apparently that's the peak of our collective intelligence and ambition. :(
I just get sad. HN is a place where a supposed intellectual elite gathers but they don't seem to be interested in anything beyond their pet language that will never have even 1% of the goodness that a much-derided language like Golang has. And I view that as a waste of energy and time, and as a very sad thing in general.
It’s easy to become disheartened, particularly in the world of web development. It looks like we’ve been around the industry for a similar amount of time, and I agree that the amount of wheel-reinventing in web development is shockingly bad for a part of the industry with so many resources poured into it by now. But have faith, my friend! Even in frontend web work, good ideas do break through from time to time. :-)
Not so long ago, there were plenty of FE people who would argue to the end of time that JavaScript was fine and building ever larger frontend applications wouldn’t benefit from static types that just take more work to write. Today, it seems TypeScript has almost entirely displaced JavaScript for that kind of work.
Not so long ago, we were trying to build those web frontends by manually tracking state implicit in HTML form elements and maybe doing a bit of automatic binding. Then React came along, the frontend world finally realised that immediate mode is a thing, and today building web UIs in a more declarative style from some kind of components is common to almost all of the popular libraries and frameworks.
Each of those changes must have saved millions of hours of developer effort already compared to how we did things before, as well as avoiding countless bugs. Now imagine what we could do if, just as a thought experiment, we could all use a language for frontend web work that didn’t have the legacy baggage that TS/JS have, did have a much more comprehensive and well-designed standard library, and provided better control over side effects and by extension safer and more readable code for all the interactions with remote APIs and state management and interactive DOM elements that modern web apps do all the time. I don’t know where such a language might come from today, but if we can shift such a large part of the industry to TypeScript and declarative/component-based rendering within a few years, it doesn’t seem an impossible dream.
As a counterpoint, the programming industry is vast, so the opportunity cost of using tools that are not as good as they could be is also very high. If we don’t continue to explore new possibilities, how will we make those tools better? How can we learn what is worth keeping, what to combine, what to abandon?
I believe there is huge potential in finding better programming languages and better programming models for them to describe. We are still at the stage where we are worrying about whether our programs are even behaving correctly. Sometimes we get as far as worrying about performance. There is a lot of talk about productivity but it is relatively rare that we consider language design as a way of expressing our ideas more efficiently or making it easier for someone else to understand them later.
If we look at languages like Haskell or Erlang or Rust, these have certainly been used professionally, but in the long term their most important contribution might be the ideas they introduced to wider audiences rather than anything written in those languages themselves.