The Next Programming Language - Douglas Crockford - code::dive 2022

This is the spec for the language Douglas Crockford (author of the book "JavaScript: The Good Parts", the JSON specification[1], JSLint[2]) had explained in his famous talk: "The Next Programming Language"[3]. The "big things" in the language are the Actor model, favouring immutability and capabilities-based security. Presumably, there will be a flashy website later that actually motivates why you should use this language and what's cool about it. Notice this looks similar to the JSON spec website[4]. [1] link [2] link [3] ▶ this video [4] link

I have been watching Elixir YouTube videos pretty much every day for the last few weeks. I guess there was an Elixir conference recently and after I watched a couple, YouTube has been sending me a consistent stream of Elixir content. I really want to try out this language. I love the idea of Erlang but the few times I've had to deal with it (an ejabberd chat server was one) I found it to be a bit too quirky. Every video I've seen with Joe Armstrong leads me to believe he was an under-appreciated genius. Isolated processes and message passing (Actors) seem a good candidate for the future of distributed programming (see this recent video from Crockford on his new Misty programming language [1] - notice how the questions were about Elixir/Erlang). I love pattern matching and elixir uses this to a high degree. However, I am not 100% sold. Clearly this community punches above its weight, and the BEAM is obviously no slouch and is a brilliant choice for a platform to build upon. But I get concerned looking at the magic of LiveView (and LiveBook). My experience is that if something sounds too good to be true, it often is. A lot of the jargon is also totally unfamiliar to me - things like GenServers and other esoteric kinds of platform specific knowledge. It feels like stepping into a one-way portal, I'm not sure any knowledge in that universe is transferable. There is a huge risk in niche languages and platforms. Hard to hire for, hard to find libraries for, hard to find blogs/tutor

> Who is left to carry the torch to illuminate millions of developers who have no idea or have never heard of the Actor model? Douglas Crockford. ▶ this video