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The Internet is a mega entertainment complex built on top of a graveyard of meaning. Only Silicon Valley-approved content, opinions, and mechanisms may be used to do anything on the Internet. I talk a bit about how the Internet has been slowly choked out and how it is now dead.

I am not particularly old. BBS, Usenet, MUDs and other such 1990s constructs were not part of my childhood, but I still got to explore some of the wild Internet of the early 2000s. Practically speaking, it was like entering international waters. Seemingly no rules applied, and no law held dominion. This was the case for many years, far before the start of the 21st century, although of course the Internet did not get substantially bigger until this century.

There are a lot of programming languages, but often they are talked of in terms of what realistic applications they have in the job market. Seldom is there prose about their quality as such; independent of their popularity and application. Here’s some of my thoughts.

Quality versus utility

As most software engineers know, there is not really any correlation between the quality of a language and its popularity. There is however a correlation between popularity and utility. Python might not be the best language ever made, but any design flaws it has are offset, in the eyes of most, by the fact that it has libraries for everything. Why? Because it is in top three most popular languages, somewhere around C and Java. Therefore any issue one might encounter probably already has a complete solution in the form of a third-party library. This means that Python has extremely high utility, even if there are design issues with the language that can get in the way of common usage; while writing code.