The Slow March of Progress in Programming Language Tooling
Blog post from Earthly
The article examines the evolution of programming tools and the impact of modern developer ecosystems, highlighting the importance of tooling in shaping the usability and popularity of programming languages. It discusses how innovations like comprehensive standard libraries, third-party package repositories, and advanced package managers have become integral to new languages, offering a cohesive and efficient development experience that older languages struggle to match due to their fragmented ecosystems. The piece contrasts languages like Go and Rust, which provide batteries-included development environments, with older languages that often lack standardized tooling. It emphasizes how these modern languages incorporate innovations, such as code formatters and cross-compiling capabilities, to enhance developer experiences, contributing to their ranking as loved languages in surveys. The article concludes by noting that as tooling standards rise, newer languages gain an incremental advantage, making them more appealing to developers compared to their older counterparts.