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Vendorization. For every language out there there is a consulting firm or corporation selling tooling and support. This allows business strategies aimed at mark

by eecc 8y ago

Vendorization. For every language out there there is a consulting firm or corporation selling tooling and support. This allows business strategies aimed at market capture and monopolization. To business, you’re not a general purpose plumber, you’re just a specially trained installer of a particular brand of water boiler.

frou_dh 8y ago
Are you saying that the original creators of languages are motivated to a large extent by the thought of distant future consulting money? Because that does not ring true at all.
GuB-42 8y ago
This is a consequence, not a cause. With a few exceptions (ex: Java), successful languages are designed with a use case. C is for writing UNIX, Rust for Firefox, PHP for generating personal home pages and JS was Netscape's solution for dynamic webpages, Go is well suited to what Google is doing. Authors of these languages want them to be successful because the more popular a language is, the more people will help them on their project. They may even give out free tooling and support for that reason. Consulting firms usually come later, when the language is already popular.
tabtab 8y ago
I suspect the Razor engine/language is a case of vendorization. (Razor is a markup templating language which is part of MS Visual Studio.) I suspect MS promoted it because it complicates IDE design (parsing) so as to keep other IDE's out of their turf. The prior templating syntax ("<%...%>") was simple to learn, simple to use, easy to read, easy to debug, and easy to parse (per IDE vendor). Razor didn't add much in practical features to justify the huge leap in complexity it caused. It may save 2% of key-strokes but complicated syntax and parsing by a factor of roughly 30. It would have to save at least 25% of keystrokes to justify 30x complexity in my opinion. Let alone debugging and parsing error headaches. Bad deal.

by eecc 8y ago

frou_dh 8y ago

Are you saying that the original creators of languages are motivated to a large extent by the thought of distant future consulting money? Because that does not ring true at all.

GuB-42 8y ago

This is a consequence, not a cause. With a few exceptions (ex: Java), successful languages are designed with a use case. C is for writing UNIX, Rust for Firefox, PHP for generating personal home pages and JS was Netscape's solution for dynamic webpages, Go is well suited to what Google is doing. Authors of these languages want them to be successful because the more popular a language is, the more people will help them on their project. They may even give out free tooling and support for that reason. Consulting firms usually come later, when the language is already popular.

tabtab 8y ago

I suspect the Razor engine/language is a case of vendorization. (Razor is a markup templating language which is part of MS Visual Studio.) I suspect MS promoted it because it complicates IDE design (parsing) so as to keep other IDE's out of their turf. The prior templating syntax ("<%...%>") was simple to learn, simple to use, easy to read, easy to debug, and easy to parse (per IDE vendor). Razor didn't add much in practical features to justify the huge leap in complexity it caused. It may save 2% of key-strokes but complicated syntax and parsing by a factor of roughly 30. It would have to save at least 25% of keystrokes to justify 30x complexity in my opinion. Let alone debugging and parsing error headaches. Bad deal.