On Monday, 29 January 2018 at 11:48:07 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
I am less convinced by this argument. Go, Rust, and especially
Java have shown the power of tribalism and belonging to the one
true tribe eschewing all others. Java is a superb example of
this: the JVM is now a polyglot platform, and yet Java
programmers, especially enterprise ones, will only contemplate
using Java and refuse to be educated about Kotlin, Ceylon,
Groovy, JRuby, etc. However when a feature inspired (many years
later) by the innovations in other JVM-based languages gets
shoehorned into Java then, eventually, the Java folk are
prepared, reluctantly, to learn about it. And maybe a few years
later actually use it.
I thought this was a killer anecdote about maybe the first
programming language war... over assembly language:
"Margaret Hamilton, a celebrated software engineer on the Apollo
missions—in fact the coiner of the phrase 'software
engineering'—told me that during her first year at the Draper lab
at MIT, in 1964, she remembers a meeting where one faction was
fighting the other about transitioning away from 'some very low
machine language,' as close to ones and zeros as you could get,
to 'assembly language.' 'The people at the lowest level were
fighting to keep it. And the arguments were so similar: ‘Well how
do we know assembly language is going to do it right?’'
'Guys on one side, their faces got red, and they started
screaming,' she said. She said she was 'amazed how emotional they
got.'
Emmanuel Ledinot, of Dassault Aviation, pointed out that when
assembly language was itself phased out in favor of the
programming languages still popular today, like C, it was the
assembly programmers who were skeptical this time."
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/saving-the-world-from-code/540393/
Good to see things haven't changed in a half-century. ;) Not that
I'm saying assembly was the obvious choice: maybe their
assemblers were buggy or slow or whatever, it all depends on the
details.
