> The problem with evolution in general is that it doesn't select the best approaches, it selects the most popular ones.
Not sure what you mean by this. At least in a biological setting, natural selection selects for `adaptive' features, i.e., those which best solve some problem that an organism has. (OK, it's more complicated than that, but let's take that as a working definition.) It does not select `popular' features. Rather, features become popular because they are adaptive and hence selected for.
Now, programming language evolution may not always work like biological evolution, and in both cases there may be other selection pressures at work. But I don't see a reason to think that, insofar as programming language evolution is like biological evolution, the `natural selection' of language features by the community would favor what's arbitrarily popular, instead of what's best at solving a common problem.
Not sure what you mean by this. At least in a biological setting, natural selection selects for `adaptive' features, i.e., those which best solve some problem that an organism has. (OK, it's more complicated than that, but let's take that as a working definition.) It does not select `popular' features. Rather, features become popular because they are adaptive and hence selected for.
Now, programming language evolution may not always work like biological evolution, and in both cases there may be other selection pressures at work. But I don't see a reason to think that, insofar as programming language evolution is like biological evolution, the `natural selection' of language features by the community would favor what's arbitrarily popular, instead of what's best at solving a common problem.