EvanWard97

I was pondering how internet latency seems to be just barely sufficient for a decent fast-paced online multiplayer gaming experience. If human cognition were say, 20x faster relative to the speed of light, we'd be limited to playing many games only with players from the same city. More significantly, single-threaded compute performance relative to human cognition would effectively be limited to the equivalent of 300 MHz (6 GHz / 20), which I suspect makes it a challenge to run even barebones versions of many modern games.

This led me to wondering how software development would have progressed if CPU clock speeds were effectively 20x slower.

Might the overall greater pressure for performance have kept us writing lower-level code with more bugs while shipping less features? Or could it actually be that having all the free compute to throw around has comparatively gotten us into trouble, because we've been able to just rapidly prototype and eschew more formal methods and professionalization?

It seems that some programming languages are simply better (i.e. overall safer, faster to read/write/compile/run, more expressive and efficient to develop in) than others. Overall worse languages often stick around though due to what often seems to essentially be community momentum--what could also be thought of as coordination failure.

Many individuals think "X lang clearly seems better, but Y is where the community momentum already is, so I am going with Y", and there isn't a clear way for developers and employers to commit to developing in language X instead of Y if "N quantity Y lang developers publicly commit to changing their next project that would otherwise be in Y lang to be in X lang."

While a public promise with public git repos may be enough, we may be able to even utilize smart contracts in the near future to help foster community-wide switches.

Also, while I'm not familiar enough with the languages to confidently say the dev community would be better if we could make the switch, I had: Python → Julia C → D C++ → D or Rust in mind, but whether or not you'd agree about these, I'm confident there are at least other switches worth making.

Would you pledge to switch to programming languages if enough of the industry agreed to do the same? If so, for which languages might you? Is this worth thinking about more?