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Do you think the "bored" and "move on" story could be driven by more than just a "shiny" new language perhaps? Economics maybe? Perhaps some developers in the

Do you think the "bored" and "move on" story could be driven by more than just a "shiny" new language perhaps? Economics maybe? Perhaps some developers in the "PHP/Python/Ruby/Node/Go/Elixir/Swift" crowd are trying to gain credibility in the OSS/Github world by making a not-yet-developed but vital library in the new language. If github is your resume, this could be a large win for their portfolio/resume. Another take... For Python, there are dozens of projects that do the same manipulations, but are implemented slightly differently. People can, of course, contribute(patches, issues, etc.) to libraries they use the most... or they can make the 25th iteration. A new language presents a way to tickle the brain in a not-so-tedious manner by eliminating the technical debt in the other language's implementation while providing new paradigms to code around. I call that tickling the brain and it can be addicting.

StevePerkins 11y ago
This is only supposition, but I believe that the vast majority of idle programming discussion on the Internet is non-professional. If you go to a site like StackOverflow, that is related to getting actual work done... the questions for Java, .NET, C++, and PHP absolutely dwarf those for Ruby, Python, and other fashionable dynamic languages (JavaScript being a notable exception). If you look at the number of GitHub repos by language, you find a similar pattern. However, you go to sites like Hacker News and others that are more about idle discussion, and it's hard to find people who will even admit to working with non-sexy industry standard languages. If you didn't know better, you would get the impression that there are more Nim and Forth programmers in the world than PHP ones. I believe that is because most such discussion comes either from students, who haven't started a career yet, or from professionals who enjoy discussing the "side" languages that they learn in their personal time (yet are not using professionally). I don't mean this in a negative way. I myself wrote OBSESSIVELY about Scala for years, even though my actual day jobs had me writing vanilla Java. But online discussion does create a bit of a "reality distortion field", that confuses young people just starting out. The #haskell channel on FreeNode is the most popular programming channel in all of IRC... yet the entire world's population of non-academic professional Haskell developers could hold a conference at the airport Holiday Inn. Rust is a fascinating language to learn and dabble with, but almost none of us will ever have a job working with it professionally. Etc. People get "bored" and "move on" from these languages not due to economics, but due to lack of economics. They are playing with them for fun, not because they're getting paid to do professional work with them. Hence the constant search for newer shiny things.
- mattmanser 11y ago
  http://stackoverflow.com/tags http://stackoverflow.com/tags Doesn't support what you said. C++, for example, is smaller than Python. Ruby has about a 1/4 of the questions of Java. They're certainly not "absolutely dwarfed". Python is overwhelmingly the language of choice for scientists afaik.
- EugeneOZ 11y ago
  You are writing it as comment to article, where demonstrated commercial usage of Rust and explained benefits of this usage. I do it not because Rust is a new shiny thing, but because I LOVE key ideas of errors handling, results returning and memory safety (RAII is awesome thing). I use it not because "oh, I can finally play with it", but because "finally I see language where things are done right so I can write code effectively, customers will be served without failures and I will not spend so many time in debugging stage anymore" - time is the most valuable resource. In usage Rust is not so cute and shiny (in first month). It's only pragmatic decision. And I'm glad I was able to convince my employer.

StevePerkins 11y ago

This is only supposition, but I believe that the vast majority of idle programming discussion on the Internet is non-professional. If you go to a site like StackOverflow, that is related to getting actual work done... the questions for Java, .NET, C++, and PHP absolutely dwarf those for Ruby, Python, and other fashionable dynamic languages (JavaScript being a notable exception). If you look at the number of GitHub repos by language, you find a similar pattern. However, you go to sites like Hacker News and others that are more about idle discussion, and it's hard to find people who will even admit to working with non-sexy industry standard languages. If you didn't know better, you would get the impression that there are more Nim and Forth programmers in the world than PHP ones. I believe that is because most such discussion comes either from students, who haven't started a career yet, or from professionals who enjoy discussing the "side" languages that they learn in their personal time (yet are not using professionally). I don't mean this in a negative way. I myself wrote OBSESSIVELY about Scala for years, even though my actual day jobs had me writing vanilla Java. But online discussion does create a bit of a "reality distortion field", that confuses young people just starting out. The #haskell channel on FreeNode is the most popular programming channel in all of IRC... yet the entire world's population of non-academic professional Haskell developers could hold a conference at the airport Holiday Inn. Rust is a fascinating language to learn and dabble with, but almost none of us will ever have a job working with it professionally. Etc. People get "bored" and "move on" from these languages not due to economics, but due to lack of economics. They are playing with them for fun, not because they're getting paid to do professional work with them. Hence the constant search for newer shiny things.

mattmanser 11y ago
http://stackoverflow.com/tags http://stackoverflow.com/tags Doesn't support what you said. C++, for example, is smaller than Python. Ruby has about a 1/4 of the questions of Java. They're certainly not "absolutely dwarfed". Python is overwhelmingly the language of choice for scientists afaik.
EugeneOZ 11y ago
You are writing it as comment to article, where demonstrated commercial usage of Rust and explained benefits of this usage. I do it not because Rust is a new shiny thing, but because I LOVE key ideas of errors handling, results returning and memory safety (RAII is awesome thing). I use it not because "oh, I can finally play with it", but because "finally I see language where things are done right so I can write code effectively, customers will be served without failures and I will not spend so many time in debugging stage anymore" - time is the most valuable resource. In usage Rust is not so cute and shiny (in first month). It's only pragmatic decision. And I'm glad I was able to convince my employer.