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It's interesting that no one blinks twice at the thought of using a decades-old operating system - it's "mature", "battle tested", "proven over time" or some ot

It's interesting that no one blinks twice at the thought of using a decades-old operating system - it's "mature", "battle tested", "proven over time" or some other phrase. On the other hand, programming languages that are decades old are looked upon as antiquated and not fit for modern problems, so we create new languages and discard the old ones, including forgetting useful ideas those languages contained. Sometimes, we come back to some of those ideas. So a dynamic language decides that types are in fact quite useful, and a single exe file is so much simpler to distribute than endless tiny script files, and maybe speed does matter after all. Not passing judgement, just saying that's how it is. And it is rather odd isn't it?

PLenz 10y ago
That's the fundamental difference between infrastructure folks - inherently conservative, keep it running, 9 9s of uptime - and developers - restless, ohhhhh shiny, seekers of the new and novel.
tbrake 10y ago
I think most programming languages that are decades old aren't looked at as 'not fit for modern problems' so much as 'inefficient for modern* development'. Is it possible to do the same things in C that we can in Ruby, PHP or Node? Absolutely. But can it be written in the same time frame? While I'm sure there are HNers out there who can - or who at least claim they can ;) - let's ask ourselves if that's really broadly truthful outside of trivial example applications. I'd wager 'no'. Those higher level languages might 'forget' something in the past and 'rediscover' it but I feel like that's kind of a very minor sub-plot in the larger story of the usefulness of their abstraction and ability to represent more powerful ideas in less lines of code. * - read 'web'. Old and low level languages are still obviously used in a wide variety of projects and industries.
- di4na 10y ago
  Meanwhile, erlang...
problems 10y ago
> It's interesting that no one blinks twice at the thought of using a decades-old operating system - it's "mature", "battle tested", "proven over time" or some other phrase. We use maintained operating systems that started decades ago - there are basically no good maintained options outside of Unix and Windows these days. You need a seriously extreme number of testers to have a relatively bug-free operating system. We run proprietary RTOSes for some stuff at work and the number of weird bugs are crazy. We have to reboot every 280-some days because otherwise the machine will crash, IGMPv2 randomly stops working after a couple months - there's no v3 implementation at all, weird hacks just to make the thing boot, etc. And that's on top of the fact that their semi-official ports of modern open source tools don't work half the time and haven't been updated in years. You really don't want to mess around with esoteric operating systems if you want any chance of having a stable useful application. OSes just do too much.

PLenz 10y ago

That's the fundamental difference between infrastructure folks - inherently conservative, keep it running, 9 9s of uptime - and developers - restless, ohhhhh shiny, seekers of the new and novel.

tbrake 10y ago

I think most programming languages that are decades old aren't looked at as 'not fit for modern problems' so much as 'inefficient for modern* development'. Is it possible to do the same things in C that we can in Ruby, PHP or Node? Absolutely. But can it be written in the same time frame? While I'm sure there are HNers out there who can - or who at least claim they can ;) - let's ask ourselves if that's really broadly truthful outside of trivial example applications. I'd wager 'no'. Those higher level languages might 'forget' something in the past and 'rediscover' it but I feel like that's kind of a very minor sub-plot in the larger story of the usefulness of their abstraction and ability to represent more powerful ideas in less lines of code. * - read 'web'. Old and low level languages are still obviously used in a wide variety of projects and industries.

di4na 10y ago
Meanwhile, erlang...

problems 10y ago

> It's interesting that no one blinks twice at the thought of using a decades-old operating system - it's "mature", "battle tested", "proven over time" or some other phrase. We use maintained operating systems that started decades ago - there are basically no good maintained options outside of Unix and Windows these days. You need a seriously extreme number of testers to have a relatively bug-free operating system. We run proprietary RTOSes for some stuff at work and the number of weird bugs are crazy. We have to reboot every 280-some days because otherwise the machine will crash, IGMPv2 randomly stops working after a couple months - there's no v3 implementation at all, weird hacks just to make the thing boot, etc. And that's on top of the fact that their semi-official ports of modern open source tools don't work half the time and haven't been updated in years. You really don't want to mess around with esoteric operating systems if you want any chance of having a stable useful application. OSes just do too much.