Why are experienced programmers so hostile toward beginners?

Which features would a new programming language need to attract experienced and inexperienced programmers?

• I'm interested in designing programming languages and have been trying to find what features a programming language would need to be interesting to beginning programmers and hardcore programmers. I would also like to research if certain features could help optimize programs, so the language is not just syntactically and semantically pleasing but also efficient and fast.

• Answer:

  I sometimes consider writing a new programming language myself. What I believe is a keypoint for a new language to encounter it's audience it to clearly define the "Why" of this language. Why should it exists, what is it good for and also what is it's cost. Existing sucessfull language all have a clear enough positionning: - C: low level programming - C++: performances in object oriented framework - Java: portability in object oriented framework - Javascript: browser scripting - Erlang: massively parallell programming - Python: syntax simplicity, powerful abstraction level and efficient libs - Perl: system scripting tasks, text manipulation - Haskell: AI, functional programming Any new language should be easy to define this way using a short sentence. Of course all of the above are general purpose languages today and can do much more than what you can describe in one line. To me this seems to be the first step before defining features: what ecological niche will you aim when defining a new language. Features will only be a second step.