alt Hacker NewsMaybe, but personally I've become quite tired of programming languages "organically grown" as opposed to properly designed the first time. After a good decade of C then C++, I found ANSI CL (despite being a massive compromise and unfinished) much more coherent and complete than both.
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Scheme is (or at least was) coherent. You don't need to look any further than set/setf/setq to see that Common Lisp is "organically grown" from the fertilizer of a committee. CL does its best to make every other lisp more attractive.
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
-- Greenspun's tenth rule
He had some lack of conviction to scope it so narrowly.
So which language had it right from the start? is there a language that has a very low rewrite status?
ANSI CL is such a breath of fresh air nowadays. Does what you need, doesn't get in your way, comes with batteries included. And conditions are just god-tier.
It isn't realistic to expect a design to be "proper in first place" because requirements change; my opinion is indeed the opposite - I find it natural for programming languages to have a (sort of) lifespan, and for new ones to (sort of) take their place.
"properly designed" - ah yes, programming languages are famous for universally agreed upon design philosophies.
You may be tired of languages evolving over time, but there is no other way to build a rich and useful language.
I liked Objective-C (except the C parts). Such a breath of fresh air coming from C++ which was grown like a cancer with tons of features and you felt trapped by every one of them.
Objective-C in contrast was a very few additions thoughtfully added that composed cleanly and freed the programmer to actually get things done.
I know Go is justly criticized for many of its design decisions, but it still feels well-designed and "small" to me in day to day usage when many other languages don't.