A little rabbithole found: Language X is like Language Y

I chanced upon Kotlin is like Typescript today via this HN thread

It feels like it's mostly a parody of sorts but I wanted to take a look at the repo. And discovered a lovely little line of where the idea actually derived from

Kotlin is like Typescript | derived from | Swift is like Kotlin | derived from | Swift is like Go | derived from | Swift is a lot like Scala | which also inspired | Swift is like C#.

Does that mean that Typescript is like Scala?

If these example are at all possible to produce in a way that can be considered sane, then how close are most languages to each other? Why use one over the other?

Maybe there's some truth to this comment from HN

Maybe the generalized version is simply:

"All these new languages with C-derived syntax and automatic memory management are pretty much the same -- so pick the one that is most supported on your target platform, get to work, and don't worry about it."

I'm kind of expecting someone to do a "Meta-Kotlin" next: a language that has the common intersection of features from Swift, Kotlin, C# and TypeScript, and offers tidy code generation for any of these.

Also relevant, this talk from DHH at RailsConf 2017

Posted on May 19 2017 by Adnan Issadeen