On Wednesday, 3 January 2018 at 11:43:35 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
On Wednesday, 3 January 2018 at 11:13:04 UTC, Joakim wrote:
On Wednesday, 3 January 2018 at 10:29:05 UTC, Ola Fosheim
Grøstad wrote:
On Wednesday, 3 January 2018 at 09:56:48 UTC, Pjotr Prins
wrote:
[...]
Good programmers aren't stuck on any single language and will
pick the tool best suited for the job at hand. Good
programmers are also good at picking up new languages.
And who do you know who does this? While I myself have
espoused the idea of the best tool for the job in this forum,
realistically, other than a small handful of coders, when does
that ever happen?
[...]
Everyone at my employer, a few thousand of them doing
enterprise consulting.
We specialize in a few large domains, and tend to jump between
them every 6 months or a year, when switching projects.
On my case, full stack development across JVM and .NET
languages, with C++ for low level coding.
How many of those few thousand are actually comfortable with C++
for low-level coding? I think you've said before that it's not
many. So okay, your colleagues switch between Java and C#, which
is somewhat uncommon as many places are pure C# or Java shops,
but those are the two most popular enterprise application
languages, noted for their similarities.
You can hardly use this as an example of having a toolbox of
languages and picking the best for the job, say Erlang for some
high-concurrency microservice or ruby for an app you need to get
up and running quickly. You're just using two of the most
popular business languages and deciding which based on what the
customer wants.
On Wednesday, 3 January 2018 at 14:08:20 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
On Wednesday, 3 January 2018 at 11:13:04 UTC, Joakim wrote:
Not necessarily, it all depends if thinking you're the best
leads to taking your eye off the ball of improving and
acknowledging your problems, which I see little indication of
here.
Well, if a language is used for a narrow set of application
areas then one might be able to have a deep understanding of
what the challenges are.
In general I think it is difficult to understand what
challenges people have in areas one have little familiarity
with. I've seen this time and time again in discussions about
memory management.
I think both Rust and D suffers a bit from this. And likewise,
I think C++ designers are making a mistake by presuming that
C++ can become a competitive high level language.
So it is a general challenge in language design, I think.
These languages may all have these problems, but I don't see the
connection to your original point about it not being good to
think you're the best.
And who do you know who does this? While I myself have
espoused the idea of the best tool for the job in this forum,
realistically, other than a small handful of coders, when does
that ever happen?
I don't know how many… But if you have a good understanding of
a language like Java and C/machine language, and also have the
equivalent of a bachelor in comp sci, then I think you should
be able to pick up just about any language in relatively short
time (except C++ where the know-how is less accessible for
various reasons).
More programmers don't have a bachelors in CS than those who do.
I think you'll find the percentage who regularly use multiple
languages is fairly low, let alone evaluating each one for each
job.
Anyway, it is my impression that many C/C++ programmers also
know Python and also have a good understanding of basic
functional programming.
So two tools in the toolbox is enough?
I recently read some article linked off proggit that stated
the reality much better: programmers learn a language that
suits them, then use it everywhere they can.
Well. Take an iOS programmer. She/he would start out with
Objective-C, which requires understanding of C. Then maybe you
also need to interface with C++ in order to use some library.
Then you switch over to Swift… Then you need to port the app to
Android and have to pick up some Java. Then somebody want to
turn it into a webapp and you pick up TypeScript… Then someone
needs interfacing with C# for a web-service and you pick up a
bit of that…
As long as you are interfacing with other systems you often
achieve more by learning enough to use something written in
another language than by picking a suboptimal solution that use
your favourite language.
If you're just stitching together a bunch of libraries written by
others, sure, you can pick up enough to interface them. But we
were talking about switching between significant use of each
language based on the job, which almost never happens. Your
company is much more likely to bring in somebody with Java
experience to write the Android portion.
But sure, if I need to hack together something I would usually
think about using Python first, mostly because it is so
mallable for smaller tasks. Not really because it is my
preferred language. I don't really like dynamic typing in
principle, but it is productive for smaller tasks and
prototyping.
Whatever the reason, everybody has their go-to language that they
generally stick to. Very few have a deep toolbox of languages,
where they just pull out the best one for each job. It is
unrealistic to expect the vast majority of programmers to do any
more than use one language most of the time.
Given how much effort it takes to know a language platform
well, not only the language itself but all the libraries and
their bottlenecks, and most programmers' limited motivation to
pick up new tech, that is the only approach that makes sense
for the vast majority.
Well, but libraries and frameworks are unfortunately not
permanent. They are shifting relatively fast. Heck, even the
Java standard library contains many things that you don't want
to use, because there is something better in there.
So if you start on a new project there is often a more
productive framework you could go with.
This actually argues for a single language: you're going to spend
a ton of time tracking all those shifting frameworks so you won't
have time for a new language too, but at least you won't have to
learn a new language every time you pick up the new js framework
of the day.
And that might require adopting a new language as well.
This is of course good for new languages. If this was not the
case then it would be near impossible for new languages to
establish themselves.
The ongoing churn may help new languages with new users and
companies, don't think it helps with users who already know a
language well.
But it can also be taken as a sign that we don't have the
languages and tooling that enable writing really good timeless
libraries and frameworks.
Seems like an oxymoron, tech changes so fast that I don't see how
anything could be timeless, even if you really mean "will still
be the same 20 years from now." ;)
Maybe that will change in the future, I guess we now are
reaching a point where neither CPU or memory are the limiting
factor for most mundane applications. So maybe that will cause
a more stable infrastructure to emerge… but probably not in our
lifetime. I think we still have a long way to go in even simple
areas such as GUI frameworks.
There's always new stuff other than that, eg more limited mobile
hardware over the last decade has returned the tech market to
earlier times, and native languages like Obj-C and Swift have
benefited.
Yes, but if you're only hyped because you were stowed away on
a popular platform, ie javascript in the browser, or are easy
to learn, Go from what I hear, then the technical limitations
of the language put a ceiling on how high you can go. You'll
get to that ceiling faster, but then you're stuck there.
I perceived that there was a lot of hype around Python 15 years
ago or so. Now, universities are replacing Java with Python as
the introduction language and Python is also becoming the
defacto language for scientific programming. Python is
basically getting critical mass and is now managing to take on
Matlab and perhaps to some extent even C++/Fortran.
Python has done well in those niches, but when is the last time
you saw a popular GUI app written in Python? That is the largest
segment of the market, and Python has basically no uptake there.
Even Java got nowhere in the consumer GUI market, other than a
few p2p apps like Vuze and the now-defunct Limewire, largely for
piracy.
There is a loooong road for languages like Rust, D and Julia…
All those scientific simulation frameworks creates are rather
heavy critical mass. That is very difficult to move around
(Matlab was for a long time dominant).
While that market may be important to you, it is a small segment
of the programming market. It's nice that D libraries like Mir
are targeting it, but it's not going to move the needle much.
And who's to say D doesn't have critical mass? I'd say
100-200k users (my math based on the chart below: 2k
downloads/day of dmd X 60 days between major versions +
ldc/gdc and external downloads) is a significant market:
http://erdani.com/d/downloads.daily.png
I don't know what to make out of the download metric. It would
be easier to grasp if it was broken down into regional
downloads and if it isn't already, filtered by unique IPs.
I believe it is filtered for repeated downloads, but we don't
know exactly how.
It's not hyped or popular, but you can leverage that base to
get bigger, particularly since you didn't sell out and
specialize to get that base in the first place.
Well, but nobody picks a language because it is a good language
for building libraries. They might avoid a language if it is
bad at that, but for a single application you often don't need
generic programming.
You don't pick a language for that, you pick it because it has
all these great libraries that make building your app faster.
You may not even know that's because of generic programming, you
just like all the great libraries. IOW, you may think you don't
need generic programming, but the libraries you do need do need
it.
When focusing on a niche you have an easier sell for the
specifics of a project. Being a bit better than Rust at this,
Go and that and C++ an this and that, isn't given as much
weight as "hands down most productive solution for Y". And
being the most productive goes beyond language and even
libraries, it also includes knowhow and online tutorials for
that narrow area.
I'd argue it's historically actually been the opposite: just pick
a popular language and go with it, without bothering to figure
out if there's some niche language better suited for Y. With the
fragmentation in languages over the last decade and a half,
that's been changing, partly because of how much easier it is to
get the word out about these less-popular languages on the
internet now.
However, there's always going to be space for a few
general-purpose languages to complement the many single-purpose
languages. D's aiming for the former, not the latter.
I understand you think the former are on the way out but many of
us disagree, for the reasons laid out above.
