1. A pretty significant amount of code is PHP serving broken HTML + Javascript, stuff which favours pragmatism over purity (to the degree that even some of the most pragmatic people hate it with a passion). These languages are popular because the authors focused on delivering results, not naval gazing.
2. When a language community starts talking up its the theoretical features with a passion, it's a red flag. Odds are, the documentation will be obtuse, and the community will bite noobs who don't know the theory. Even if they try to be nice to beginners, it's against their instincts to give simplified (if technically incorrect) answers. If your High School math teacher told you that "differentiation finds the slop of a graph, by finding f(x+e) / f(e) where e is really small", she was lying, but it's a good kind of lie.
A pedantic explanation will just confuse people, and stop most of them from understanding it well enough to learn how to appreciate the technicalities.
Your issue number 1 does actually (as I understand it) not apply to Julia, since it is actually really well designed and not tinkering. Matlab is the PHP of scientific computing ;)
About 2: The Haskell community is one of the friendliest I know, yet, it is one with the strictest theoretical background.
PHP was popular for a number of reasons, I think mostly because of the easy mix of HTML and PHP tags as well as the ready-to-run Apache/PHP/Mysql setup. From a maintainability standpoint, a lot of people suffer from this.
Its the same point that people have had about "Clean Code" and Unit tests. Some think it keeps them from getting work done. When a unit test of mine suddenly fails, I silently know, that some other person has just now also broken their code and does not know about this, will find out eventually but will not see why immediately. While they try to find their bug, I have already fixed mine and implemented tons of features in the time.
1. A pretty significant amount of code is PHP serving broken HTML + Javascript, stuff which favours pragmatism over purity (to the degree that even some of the most pragmatic people hate it with a passion). These languages are popular because the authors focused on delivering results, not naval gazing.
2. When a language community starts talking up its the theoretical features with a passion, it's a red flag. Odds are, the documentation will be obtuse, and the community will bite noobs who don't know the theory. Even if they try to be nice to beginners, it's against their instincts to give simplified (if technically incorrect) answers. If your High School math teacher told you that "differentiation finds the slop of a graph, by finding f(x+e) / f(e) where e is really small", she was lying, but it's a good kind of lie.
A pedantic explanation will just confuse people, and stop most of them from understanding it well enough to learn how to appreciate the technicalities.