Cyberscript

Yes, it was very promising, but unfortunately abandoned. And yeah, the name was bad too. But it doesn't matter. Lua/Luau is still the only serious language in this field, which is a pity.

Google's Go has made finding info on the ancient Chinese board game generally referred to in English by its Japanese name Go difficult. This has has interestingly lead to increased use of its original name Weiqi or its Korean name Baduk.

In the 90s/2000s people also used to shorten cybersex to cyber. I guess if they wanted to have fun with it they could add a "Wanna Cyber?" in place of the usual "Try <x>".

Devs will never learn this because naming languages after common words is exactly the PL dev culture. It's not important to pldevs because they know the median number of users for a pl is 0, large companies know they can buy the search results, so names are chosen for reasons other than SEO.

People get around it by appending "-lang" or "-script" to the name and that solves the SEO.

My old web-framework was called "cyberweb". I wanted to insinuate that it is modern and futuristic.

At some point in time, though, I was tired of prefacing "cyber" to I simplified it to just 'web'. Makes also more sense, e. g. in ruby:

    require 'web'

But I like cyber as a theme still. Just as a name itself, it may indeed not be optimal, so I do not totally disagree with you either. The name is a bit of a problem though because people will wonder what the difference is to javascript. In turn people using javascript wonder why it contains the substring java.

[dead]

For gamedev scripting, the gap has not been filled yet. Lua is good for embedding but the language itself is terrible for LLM usage (too much dynamic typing). C# is too heavy for scripting usage (long compile times, clunky to embed into a C++ engine), and other alternatives (AngelScript, daScript, ...) are just too niche.

This gives me "why build dropbox" energy.

We never know when a revelation or unmet customer niche arrives around the corner. Never bet against it.

The major use cases have not been filled, only the major corporate use cases. That doesn't mean there aren't still major gaps to be filled now, or that the current use cases won't evolve in the future.

This talk argues there are many purposes for formal languages other than programming: https://medium.com/bits-and-behavior/my-splash-2016-keynote-...

So it may be true that "programming language" development is done, but there are many more applications for formal languages than just writing apps and websites and such.

Moreover, it may be true that less code as a proportion of all code is being written or read by humans. But more humans today are reading and writing code than ever before. So the ability to express unambiguous ideas to agents using formal langauges is more important than ever, even if people are only reading/writing a small proportion of all code.

Similarly, it's not true that because agents will be reading / writing code that language ergonomics do not matter. Agents have resource restrictions like token budgets, and they are also trained using human knowledge and conventions. Ergonomics apply to agents just as they do humans; languages which are verbose require more tokens to write, languages that can be verified are more useful in agentic loops, languages with live compiler introspection and interpreters can give fast results to agents etc.

So I hold exactly the opposite view: it's not clear to me why languages built 30 years ago in a world where the Internet barely existed would be accidentally ideal for AI agents in 2026 to the pint we can say the whole field is solved for good (and no, I don't think the amount of training data on those languages seals the fate because that status is ephemeral and also it's not clear training on one language corpus isn't transferrable to other languages).

[dead]

I disagree. UTF-8 is the right default. Pure ASCII strings are rarely needed in modern software. Unless you know that you need ASCII, your strings should support unicode.

I agree. At this point scripting languages should have native support for string subtypes with custom charsets (ascii/utf16) or just regexp-defined or even ENUM()'erated values.

IIRC historically on Windows, a string was UTF16, on unix it was ASCII; nowadays everywhere it's UTF8 without a way to specifically limit what goes into a string.

For example UTF8 opens the door to homoglyph attacks and various other things (RTL, spaces), and a program should be able to force a string to be ASCII-only so that these classes of problems are ruled out.

"Showing script time (orange), load time (gray), and peak memory usage."

Lua has users. Network effects are important. (I have a PhD in programming languages.)