5 ms·

Rust is the first language I've seen that even has a chance though.

by bigcheesegs 9y ago

yoz-y 9y ago
Languages rarely get replaced though. We are just adding to the pile.
- ahartmetz 9y ago
  Only in a very strict interpretation that everything that is still used somewhere didn't get replaced. Perl was more or less replaced, for example, and I like that. The only kind of originality that is good in programming is "surprisingly simple". "Surprisingly weird" is terrible.
  - oblio 9y ago
    You're going to get at least 1 angry Perl programmer explaining that Perl is actually thriving and it's never been better to be a Perl programmer :p Which is actually partially true... the long tail of programming languages today is very, very big. There's probably 10-50x more programmers now than there were back in 1995. The programming world can probably sustain 10-20 mainstream languages these days, if not more.
    - kamaal 9y ago
      >>Perl is actually thriving and it's never been better to be a Perl programmer :p Don't know about that. But only yesterday afternoon I spent like 2 hours writing a Perl script to heavy lift some Unix file work, Which I factored would take a week at-least to do in any other language. Perl is still largely a very useful language without any replacements. So are awk and sed. Web development world seems to have moved on to something else now.
      - oblio 9y ago
        > But only yesterday afternoon I spent like 2 hours writing a Perl script to heavy lift some Unix file work, which I factored would take a week at-least to do in any other language. I'm guessing you're more familiar with Perl, because I personally find it hard to believe that Perl by itself is an order of magnitude more efficient to write than Python or Ruby.
        kamaal 9y ago
        >>I personally find it hard to believe that Perl by itself is an order of magnitude more efficient to write than Python or Ruby. Ruby is ok. But Perl is million times a better language than Python. Python is an extremely overrated language.
        vgy7ujm 9y ago
        Well said!
        oblio 9y ago
        You haven't addressed my (implied) question,though. I don't think that the average Perl programmer is an order of magnitude more productive than the average Python programmer.
- cmollis 9y ago
  +1
ahartmetz 9y ago
Yup. D had a shot, but they screwed it up with (effectively) mandatory garbage collection. Ada also had a shot, I think, but they screwed it up with no C compatibility and expensive SDKs - or something. For some reason, Ada is just not perceived as "cool". It actually seems like a pretty good language!
- pjmlp 9y ago
  The issue with D is not mandatory garbage collection, rather its quality and anti-GC religion. Joe Duffy mentioned on his Rustconf talk that Windows devs even with Midori running in front of them, it was still a very hard sell for them to psychology accept it as doable. The problem with Ada was basically expensive SDK, Pascal-like syntax and not being part of OS SDKs. Only systems programming languages that are bundled with OS SDKs survive on the market, others either get a niche (Ada - high integrity systems) or fade into oblivion/maintenance (Modula-2, Delphi, ...). The main reason being, companies already payed for OS SDK or gotten it for free with the OS. Any other language must add a very worthwhile set of benefits for them to look beyond the SDK and possible toolchain integration issues.
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    > Only systems programming languages that are bundled with OS SDKs survive on the market... Hmm. To Rust, this would seem to say "get bundled or die". In your view, is it enough to be a free download?
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      I don't see a free download as being enough. At very least, there needs to exist painless interoperability with the SDK toolchain, debugging tools, IDE, platform libraries. Every piece of the puzzle that doesn't quite work like the SDK tools, means additional development/debugging effort. Naturally the big question is always if the added benefit of using language X outside the expected workflow outweighs the extra development costs. Just look at C++, it was on the path of being widely adopted by desktop OSes, every C compiler vendor was adding support for it. Then BSD and Linux large scale adoption happened with GNU manifesto favouring C as the language to write portable software, Java and .NET came into the scene. Microsoft was probably the only major OS vendor still caring about it, until LLVM happened and the wind started blowing again with C++11. The embedded space is still an area where C++ is hardly seen, with a few conference talks last year discussing on how to advocate for it. Now all major C compilers are written in C++, but had Microsoft focused only on .NET or LLVM never happened, and history would probably followed another path.

Rust is the first language I've seen that even has a chance though.

yoz-y 9y ago

Languages rarely get replaced though. We are just adding to the pile.

ahartmetz 9y ago
Only in a very strict interpretation that everything that is still used somewhere didn't get replaced. Perl was more or less replaced, for example, and I like that. The only kind of originality that is good in programming is "surprisingly simple". "Surprisingly weird" is terrible.
- oblio 9y ago
  You're going to get at least 1 angry Perl programmer explaining that Perl is actually thriving and it's never been better to be a Perl programmer :p Which is actually partially true... the long tail of programming languages today is very, very big. There's probably 10-50x more programmers now than there were back in 1995. The programming world can probably sustain 10-20 mainstream languages these days, if not more.
  - kamaal 9y ago
    >>Perl is actually thriving and it's never been better to be a Perl programmer :p Don't know about that. But only yesterday afternoon I spent like 2 hours writing a Perl script to heavy lift some Unix file work, Which I factored would take a week at-least to do in any other language. Perl is still largely a very useful language without any replacements. So are awk and sed. Web development world seems to have moved on to something else now.
    - oblio 9y ago
      > But only yesterday afternoon I spent like 2 hours writing a Perl script to heavy lift some Unix file work, which I factored would take a week at-least to do in any other language. I'm guessing you're more familiar with Perl, because I personally find it hard to believe that Perl by itself is an order of magnitude more efficient to write than Python or Ruby.
      - kamaal 9y ago
        >>I personally find it hard to believe that Perl by itself is an order of magnitude more efficient to write than Python or Ruby. Ruby is ok. But Perl is million times a better language than Python. Python is an extremely overrated language.
        vgy7ujm 9y ago
        Well said!
        oblio 9y ago
        You haven't addressed my (implied) question,though. I don't think that the average Perl programmer is an order of magnitude more productive than the average Python programmer.
cmollis 9y ago
+1

ahartmetz 9y ago

Yup. D had a shot, but they screwed it up with (effectively) mandatory garbage collection. Ada also had a shot, I think, but they screwed it up with no C compatibility and expensive SDKs - or something. For some reason, Ada is just not perceived as "cool". It actually seems like a pretty good language!

pjmlp 9y ago
The issue with D is not mandatory garbage collection, rather its quality and anti-GC religion. Joe Duffy mentioned on his Rustconf talk that Windows devs even with Midori running in front of them, it was still a very hard sell for them to psychology accept it as doable. The problem with Ada was basically expensive SDK, Pascal-like syntax and not being part of OS SDKs. Only systems programming languages that are bundled with OS SDKs survive on the market, others either get a niche (Ada - high integrity systems) or fade into oblivion/maintenance (Modula-2, Delphi, ...). The main reason being, companies already payed for OS SDK or gotten it for free with the OS. Any other language must add a very worthwhile set of benefits for them to look beyond the SDK and possible toolchain integration issues.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  > Only systems programming languages that are bundled with OS SDKs survive on the market... Hmm. To Rust, this would seem to say "get bundled or die". In your view, is it enough to be a free download?
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    I don't see a free download as being enough. At very least, there needs to exist painless interoperability with the SDK toolchain, debugging tools, IDE, platform libraries. Every piece of the puzzle that doesn't quite work like the SDK tools, means additional development/debugging effort. Naturally the big question is always if the added benefit of using language X outside the expected workflow outweighs the extra development costs. Just look at C++, it was on the path of being widely adopted by desktop OSes, every C compiler vendor was adding support for it. Then BSD and Linux large scale adoption happened with GNU manifesto favouring C as the language to write portable software, Java and .NET came into the scene. Microsoft was probably the only major OS vendor still caring about it, until LLVM happened and the wind started blowing again with C++11. The embedded space is still an area where C++ is hardly seen, with a few conference talks last year discussing on how to advocate for it. Now all major C compilers are written in C++, but had Microsoft focused only on .NET or LLVM never happened, and history would probably followed another path.