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Languages thrive or die. The successful ones are those enable(d) less capable people at the time to do fashionable works as good as, or even better than the pro

by wangii 11y ago

Languages thrive or die. The successful ones are those enable(d) less capable people at the time to do fashionable works as good as, or even better than the professionals. It has nothing to do with anything other than marketing strategy: find a under served market segment and empower idiots to do mediocre+ works with little efforts. In order to achieve so, language designers have to break old paradigms, simply because if they don't, the less capable people at the time just don't understand, nor capable of (otherwise, they would be professionals).

igouy 11y ago
It's less dramatic -- languages thrive or fade away ;-)
59nadir 11y ago
> The successful ones are those enable(d) less capable people at the time to do fashionable works as good as, or even better than the professionals. It has nothing to do with anything other than marketing strategy: find a under served market segment and empower idiots to do mediocre+ works with little efforts. In order to achieve so, language designers have to break old paradigms, simply because if they don't, the less capable people at the time just don't understand, nor capable of (otherwise, they would be professionals). Most of the (most) popular languages aren't revolutionary and they're also weak in terms of level of abstraction. Reading your comment, one would assume that Lisp, batteries included-Schemes, Python, Ruby, Perl, Haskell, etc. are topping the charts. In reality, though, people are mostly using Java, C, C++, C# and yes... Python is very popular. It's outrun completely by languages that require far more work to do less, however. I don't know if I'm misreading your comment, but the above seems to stand in contrast to your point. The most popular languages are the ones with a lower level of abstraction, less expressive power and that require a programmer to write/manage more to do less, meaning they make more effort for these 'mediocre+' results. A point can be made that you think less while using these languages, but what time you don't spend on thinking is spent on writing (and then debugging) and I guess this is the 'less capable' part of your post, but this doesn't cover the fact that the languages that've enabled people to leapfrog business professionals (think Ruby + Rails being used to leapfrog professionals in web development) have almost nothing in common with the top list of used programming languages. The most used programming languages remain and have pretty much always been languages that use C syntax and don't actually push the envelope too much. Some rankings will have PHP and JS up there with the rest of them, but these fall neatly into the fold and are about as 'lame' as the rest of the top (with JS trying to walk lately).

by wangii 11y ago

igouy 11y ago

It's less dramatic -- languages thrive or fade away ;-)

59nadir 11y ago

> The successful ones are those enable(d) less capable people at the time to do fashionable works as good as, or even better than the professionals. It has nothing to do with anything other than marketing strategy: find a under served market segment and empower idiots to do mediocre+ works with little efforts. In order to achieve so, language designers have to break old paradigms, simply because if they don't, the less capable people at the time just don't understand, nor capable of (otherwise, they would be professionals). Most of the (most) popular languages aren't revolutionary and they're also weak in terms of level of abstraction. Reading your comment, one would assume that Lisp, batteries included-Schemes, Python, Ruby, Perl, Haskell, etc. are topping the charts. In reality, though, people are mostly using Java, C, C++, C# and yes... Python is very popular. It's outrun completely by languages that require far more work to do less, however. I don't know if I'm misreading your comment, but the above seems to stand in contrast to your point. The most popular languages are the ones with a lower level of abstraction, less expressive power and that require a programmer to write/manage more to do less, meaning they make more effort for these 'mediocre+' results. A point can be made that you think less while using these languages, but what time you don't spend on thinking is spent on writing (and then debugging) and I guess this is the 'less capable' part of your post, but this doesn't cover the fact that the languages that've enabled people to leapfrog business professionals (think Ruby + Rails being used to leapfrog professionals in web development) have almost nothing in common with the top list of used programming languages. The most used programming languages remain and have pretty much always been languages that use C syntax and don't actually push the envelope too much. Some rankings will have PHP and JS up there with the rest of them, but these fall neatly into the fold and are about as 'lame' as the rest of the top (with JS trying to walk lately).