On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 03:18:03PM +0200, Chris wrote: [...] > I have learned to be wary of comparisons like that. Any language > that is sponsored or owned by a big company always "outperforms" > other languages, and at the end of the day they only want to bind > you to their products, no matter how "open source" they are.
+1. I'm skeptical of attempts to reduce everything down a single number or three, that can serve as a basis for numerical (or hand-waving) comparisons. As if programming languages were that simple that one could place them neatly on what is effectively a scale of 1 to 10! > You can basically proof whatever you want. Most of the discussions I > have had don't revolve around whether the language is good or not, > it's about what people have heard/read, "Who uses it?", "I've heard > ..." "Someone said ..." I once told a guy about D. He said "Ah, D, > old-fashioned!" and he showed me a link that said "C# has a more > modern feature ... bla bla". How ... scientific! I get that a lot from Java fanboys. They make bold-sounding statements like "Java is the future!", "Java is the best!", "D sucks, nobody uses it!", "Java will get you a job easily!". But I've yet to hear some factual evidence to back up these claims. Well, maybe except the last one -- it's true that given Java's popularity, it has a high chance of landing you a job. But the point is, just because it will land you a job doesn't necessarily make it a *good* language, it merely shows that it's a *popular* one. Popular doesn't imply good. T -- "I'm running Windows '98." "Yes." "My computer isn't working now." "Yes, you already said that." -- User-Friendly
