I agree that I'm saying something the article isn't quite saying.
I've been grappling with similar questions for a while. I've been focusing less on the nominal replacements like the author did, and looking more at our general inability to create a programming language that is "like" another language, but just generally improved. C++ is almost literally the last example that really took off. Python 3 was something like what I'm talking about, and while Python survived Python 3, I'm not sure I can call it a success.
But we could really use "like X but modern" in quite a few places. I'd love to see a modern dynamic scripting language that is a lot like the current ones, but, for instance, was designed from day to work with threading somehow. In this case I'm not referencing async versus thread debates, I'm not talking about how it gets exposed to the users, I'm talking about the difficult that 10-20 year old scripting languages still have to this day using multiple processors in any reasonable way. And maybe we've learned we can get most of the benefits of dynamic scripting languages without quite being as dynamic as the current crop is, so maybe instead of a 10-40x slowdown we could be looking at another 2 or 3 speed increase over the current crop with only minimal feature loss. And a few other things.
Various such languages arguably exist, but they are starved of oxygen.
As for the bottled water point, if you look with sufficient detail you can eventually figure out why this Evian bottle is better for you than that one. No two things are identical. But if you can't how the differences between two brands of bottled water and two entire language implementations are a sufficient difference in quantity to be a difference in quality... several times over, honestly... I don't really know what to say.
I've been grappling with similar questions for a while. I've been focusing less on the nominal replacements like the author did, and looking more at our general inability to create a programming language that is "like" another language, but just generally improved. C++ is almost literally the last example that really took off. Python 3 was something like what I'm talking about, and while Python survived Python 3, I'm not sure I can call it a success.
But we could really use "like X but modern" in quite a few places. I'd love to see a modern dynamic scripting language that is a lot like the current ones, but, for instance, was designed from day to work with threading somehow. In this case I'm not referencing async versus thread debates, I'm not talking about how it gets exposed to the users, I'm talking about the difficult that 10-20 year old scripting languages still have to this day using multiple processors in any reasonable way. And maybe we've learned we can get most of the benefits of dynamic scripting languages without quite being as dynamic as the current crop is, so maybe instead of a 10-40x slowdown we could be looking at another 2 or 3 speed increase over the current crop with only minimal feature loss. And a few other things.
Various such languages arguably exist, but they are starved of oxygen.
As for the bottled water point, if you look with sufficient detail you can eventually figure out why this Evian bottle is better for you than that one. No two things are identical. But if you can't how the differences between two brands of bottled water and two entire language implementations are a sufficient difference in quantity to be a difference in quality... several times over, honestly... I don't really know what to say.