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Feb 1, 2016 at 19:19
Apparently, to make a successful language: 1. Good semantics 2. Thorough tests 3. Great tooling 4. Grow a beard!
The Secret of a Successful Programming Language? A Really Great Beard
The Secret of a Successful Programming Language? A Really Great Beard
According to Tamir Kahson, there's a direct correlation between the success of a programming language and the length of the facial hair on the face of the man who built it. And he may have a point.

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Apr 2, 2026 at 09:44
2
Some excellent safety improvements in C++26: hardening the standard library against out-of-bounds bugs, and a safer semantics for uninitialised local variables:
C++26 is done! — Trip report: March 2026 ISO C++ standards meeting (London Croydon, UK) – Sutter’s Mill
Jan 21, 2024 at 22:53
A really nice explanation of lisp semantics, using userland code! For example, you can define let in terms of let* and vice versa.
ACM Lisp Pointers V, 4 (Oct/Dec 1992), 11-20.
Jun 4, 2023 at 05:14
@RenewedRebecca That's correct, but I was thinking that offering threading to a user might make them more tolerant of a slow interpreter. For example, if I have an AST walker but provide Clojure semantics, users can hopefully get a big speedup by using all the cores in their application.