Comments on: Programming languages of distinction

By: The Technological 7-Year Itch

The Technological 7-Year Itch — Mon, 21 May 2007 10:52:03 +0000

[...] So in my answer to Scott’s question, I think it may well be that many developers completely leave. But I imagine that many others will take the path that Rob Conery, the creator of Subsonic wrote about. He’s choosing to help try and change the developer culture around Microsoft from the inside, rather than jumping ship completely. Like a good ALT.NET developer, he sees some value in the Microsoft platform and tries to combine what is good from it, along with what is good from other platforms, rather than just giving in to the self-perpetuating cycle of successful programming languages. [...]

By: Rob Palmer

Rob Palmer — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 09:35:30 +0000

Once you have learned a language, you have a huge investment of your time to protect.
It’s hardly suprising that people are reluctant to move on to other technologies.

By: troels

troels — Mon, 29 May 2006 11:08:58 +0000

Kai:
Maybe the case is that the original founders (elite programmers) are so heavily invested in their language, that they rarely move on. It’s rather the sub-elite, who have been promoted to elite. They are stuck at the second-highest rank of the social ladder - as henchmen of the founding fathers. One way to rise beyond this is to move on and settle on a new language, where they themselves can become founders. The founders themselves OTOH have nothing to gaim from the exile - they are already at the peak.

By: david

david — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 13:32:07 +0000

Kartik:

I agree that Ruby has some neat tricks (syntactic and otherwise), but when you look at development speed, bug reduction, etc., it’s hard to argue that any of them gives Ruby as big an advantage over Java or Python as the advantage that all scripting/VM languages have over manual-memory-management languages like C/C++. Closures? I remember being excited about them ten years ago when I was coding a lot in Scheme (another great programming language), but in the end, they didn’t make much of a difference in how I worked. Automatic introspection? I’m a touch typist, so saving 30 seconds of typing here or there isn’t significant.

I may come over to Ruby some day (it definitely has the most fun tutorials), but it’s also possible that before then some other language will find another low-hanging fruit like memory management that blasts Ruby, Java, Python, and everyone else right out of the water, the way that Java has blasted C/C++ for enterprise development.

By: Frice

Frice — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 09:37:22 +0000

For a more professional popularity list of programming languages, try this link:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.htm?tiobe_index

By: salamander

salamander — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 05:16:26 +0000

You may find this page quite interesting:
http://noga.muti.co.za/programming_languages

By: Kai MacTane

Kai MacTane — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 04:55:46 +0000

I’ve got to agree with Nordsieck: I don’t think truly elite developers really give a damn whether other people are using their language of choice or not. “Oh no, my Favorite Thing is getting popular, so now I have to repudiate it and pick something else to be my favorite” is not the behavior of wizard-level programmers; in my experience, it’s the behavior of latte-slurping trendoids who care more about other people’s opinions than their own taste.

Now that Perl is huge (indeed, many would say *too* huge, and past its prime), does Larry Wall move on to something new? No, he’s still working on Perl. Of course, he wrote the language, but the same goes for Tom Christiansen and Damian Conway.

I’m sure the same thing could also be said in the Python world. Now that Python is gaining popularity, are the serious wizard-level Python programmers saying “Oh, dear, it seems the proles have arrived. How teddibly gauche they are. I must go and become a Boo guru now, just to avoid these tedious plebeians”? Somehow, I don’t think so.

By: Kartik Vaddadi

Kartik Vaddadi — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 04:14:40 +0000

> Ruby has no advantage over Java to match Java’s memory-management advantage over C++
You haven’t used Ruby much, have you?

By: nordsieck

nordsieck — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 23:13:39 +0000

“Elite (guru) developers notice too many riff-raff using their current programming language, and start looking for something that will distinguish them better from their mediocre colleagues.”

This assumes that “Elite developers” actually care about what the masses use to program with. My guess is that most of them just want to use a (the most) productive language (one in which the development/testing/integration of a certain feature takes the least amount of time, balanced with the highest level of physical performance).

By: km

km — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 19:00:47 +0000

“Sub-elite (senior) developers follow the elite developers to the new language,
creating a market for books, training, etc., ”

How do you create a market without marketing?