Developer Experience

But then why any language feature at all? Why isn’t assembler good enough for everyone? Or C? Or C++?

Turns out the answer is “human frailty”. Or put a different way, the process of cognition depends on very limited amounts of short-term stack space in our wetware, and computing languages are about making the computer hospitable for the human, not about telling the system what to do. Our tradeoffs in languages would look much different if we could all easily recall 20 or 30 things at a time instead of 5-10. Languages are tools for freeing creative people from registers and stacks and heaps and memory management and all the rest; all while trying to keep the creative process grounded in the reality that it’s memory words in a Von Neumann architecture; without that grounding we’d end up too disconnected from the system to deliver anything practical.