Volapük: A Cautionary Tale for Language Communities (opens in new tab)

Or maybe it's better lesson is that no one tries to force the direction of the language. English is a bastard language, no one "controls", even as much as our grammar school teachers try to force us to use the proper form. I always find it interesting that many people who learn English as a second language often understand and know the formal rules of the language better than those of us who've spoken it natively.

The examples that the OP point out are top down choices made by "leaders" of the community. Those leaders may have created the original programming language, but then fail to realize that it is not they that control it, it is the community. And communities often don't want to be forced in one direction or another. What they like is for things to be grass roots, everyone in the community recognizes the issue, a proposal is put forward, and everyone then agrees and progress is made.

This is one reason that I'm enjoying Rust's process, example: try!(..) was a macro based bandaid over the unwieldy nature of the strong error Result type in the language, it's usage has created code which is ugly and verbose. Enter Swift with its ? syntax and everyone recognizes that this is a less verbose and cleaner way to represent the same concept. So Rust is in the process of adopting ? (It's in nightly now I believe). I don't think there is much controversy here, and the community recognizes the importance of adopting this language change (I read through the RFC and don't remember anyone against it, just differences on the scope of its meaning).

In English there have been similar things, and the controllers have always tried to stop their usage, "ain't" is a great example of that. English teachers across the US have always tried to stop its usage as a fake low class word, but it's just too good and they ain't going to stop it.

It was language of books, used mainly in Orthodox churches, like Latin in Western Europe, but now it is spoken by hundreds of millions.

"Tio estas volapukaĵo al mi" is the Esperanto equivalent of "It's all Greek to me!"

I found this funny, because that's basically what English is.

> The only basis of the Esperanto language binding on all Esperantists, which no one has the right to change, is the little work Foundation of Esperanto. If anyone deviates from the rules and models given in the said work, he can never justify himself with the words "thus desires or advises the author of Esperanto".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_evolution_of_Esperanto

Changing the language too much is "kontraŭ fundamento"

It came about because the late Dr. James Cooke Brown, inventor of Loglan, tried to keep tight control over its development by claiming intellectual property rights over it. However, Brown did not move fast enough toward finalizing, formalizing and documenting the language to satisfy some of the enthusiastic and inventive community that had formed around it.

A group of those enthusiasts kept the basic concepts and syntax of Loglan (which they deemed not copyrightable) and created a new basic vocabulary to replace the words that Brown or the Loglan Institute could claim ownership of. (Reminiscent of the IP disputes over APIs versus implementations.) The result was Lojban, which continues to have a small community and a collection of translated documents and tutorials.

[0] https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan

Later German became the language of the philosophers and scientists and English the language of the practical engineering.

English was not or is not gradually becoming a universal language, but suddenly after the US of A won the WWII(and everybody else lost, for example British lost their empire).

After the war the US banned all scientific knowledge in German, and forced the use of English. Remember they took half the scientists of Germany with them(that later created their space program), the other half were taken by the Russians.

In (inland)Europe we used to measure height of a plane over ground in meters before and during WWII. Kilometers for horizontal distance. When (North)Americans won it became the ruler of the world and imposed horizontal distance in miles, and height in feet.

I speak several languages because I love to travel and it is completely different when you speak the native language. It is not a good idea or polite to only speak one language thinking that people should talk your language because it is "universal", which usually means your country has intelligent nuclear weapons and drones that can draw any other country on their knees(or so you believe).

What I mean is that any empire will end, like any other empire has ended in the past, and things change over time.

I believe the Universal language of the future will be machines translating with small delay and helping people learn other languages much faster.

"Contrarily, major schisms or breakdowns in the relationships and development of a language and its community are big warning signs that should make you think twice about the future of a language."

Related reading includes "The Lisp Curse":

http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html

And note that "Why Lisp Did Not and Never Will Gain Enough Traction" offers this alternative explanation:

"Since there is so little pre choice, the glue that is supposed to hold a community together is too weak to draw enough people that would build up a momentum."

http://kresimirbojcic.com/2012/08/14/why-lisp-did-not-and-ne...

Maybe a nitpick, but Esperanto (which essentially replaced Volapuk) is estimated to have around 2 to 10 million speakers and is generally considered to be the most common constructed language now [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

If a community lacks reasoning, that is the real issue, not major battles, which might just means there is in fact a valid reasoning to split the community.

Keeping a community together just for the sake of doing so is a recipe for failure.

http://s8.zetaboards.com/Slovianski/forum/38184/

I prefer merging y and i, for example (although I don't always follow it myself, I experiment a lot)

For me forking was a necessity since the perl5 community was not able to come up with any improvement at all since the author left 15 years ago. It rather managed to erode the codebase and the management (the perl5 "asshole" problem). "Faith" into the developers capabilities is a now a mandatory code of conduct point, even if the said devs did nothing to prove their capabilities in the last 15 years. Using religious arguments to hold people together might have worked in the middle ages and in a post-modern community. (perl is one, go figure).

On the contrary the perl 6 and perl 5 leaders are making cynical jokes about their future, to the end that a new backend or a new fork will make the language and the community stronger. (https://youtu.be/gmmVGPdcItM 2016 - "The Ongoing Disaster That Is Perl 5‎" - Ricardo Signes) Which is of course wrong. We don't need Volapük and the Kerckhoff fork to show this.

There are many bad examples in the BSD land, the latest DragonflyBSD, and many more on debian forks.

Now to the arguments why to fork:

* perl5 argues that forking (experiments) are good, and if successful will lead to "stealing" the good parts.

This never happened so far with perl5. They rather blocked competing forks to submit bugfixes and discuss critical failures upstream. While the forks manage to enhance security, performance and add many wanted features (which were not added in the last 15 years since they were designed by perl6), upstream did nothing. It didn't even merge the security fixes.

If a community is that broken, it needs to fork to be able to survive.

However with parrot, the perl6 backend, it worked fine. The unfriendly fork (MoarVM) eventually replaced parrot, using a much simpler architecture. This was an easy fork, because they could simply replace it upstream. No need to persuade the community to switch over.

* If a product is broken beyond repair, make a new one. People will switch eventually.

Do people use better ssl libraries over openssl? Some do, but most don't. E.g for perl there's not a single TLS library binding other than to OpenSSL/NetSSLeay. No boringssl, no libressl, no PolarSSL (mbed TLS), no NSS. For crypto no libsodium.

Did HHVM survive? Well, the php devs eventually got off its ass and made an ever better version with PHP7. They didn't steal much, they rather re-architectured the whole mess. This is the best example of a successful fork which strengthened everybody. Pressure. The GCC fork under schmorp to use the new intel Pentium intrinsics was also eventually successful.

I cannot say much about Python 3, only that the inherent VM problems where not solved at all and only the forks (pypy, Graal, mypy) are able to overcome that technical debt partially. ruby has it's number of forks but is still paying for it's ruby on rails meta-architecture disaster.