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I'm sure that's all true. There is something to be said for a language that was written to a spec from the beginning, however. That is a luxury that few langu

I'm sure that's all true. There is something to be said for a language that was written to a spec from the beginning, however. That is a luxury that few languages today can claim; most language specs were written after the first version(s) of the language were implemented, and were written to match the implementation, not the other way around. Writing the specification first makes for a much cleaner language, though not always the most comfortable, if you put any weight in your own opinions. [I am speaking generally from here onwards and I am not looking for specific examples to the contrary. I know full well that there are exceptions to the generalizations below.] Lots and lots of engineers today would (and do) express complete comfort in their daily drivers of C and C++, while producing buffer overflow bugs and use-after-free bugs all the while. Maybe it isn't in the best interest of the software landscape to let developers choose the languages they use... We have, as a community, let our feeling that software development is an art dictate how we react and deal with new information; we overwhelmingly reject it. What we're doing now is so much more comfortable, and we feel like we know what we're doing with [language x] finally! Why would I want to overturn all that comfort? Software development is not an art, it is a science, and we've been ignoring the science part of that as we refuse to abandon our favorite language(s) for things that could easily be proven to be better, if we would just do the testing to determine performance numbers, ease of bug introduction, ease of maintenance, and so on. We call ourselves "software engineers" and we don't measure anything beyond the most rudimentary measurements. We DEFINITELY do not actively look to overturn our comfort in favor of finding a better language to use. We don't try to improve anything the moment that might mean that we switch languages, no matter how significant the long term advantages could be. We don't even think about what the long term advantages could be; we're too busy telling ourselves that we are smart and that we can do it in whatever language we are comfortable with.

mycall 7y ago
Calling one language better than another is subjective and open to interpretation. Clean might not be as important as critical mass in adoption, letting people more efficiently find people to work on the software.
- naikrovek 7y ago
  That depends. If you are looking for a language that produces more work for the CPU per line of source code, that is definitely not subjective. Programming languages are not hard to learn for anyone that already knows one or more. Other important metrics no one thinks to measure: * Quality of compiled assembly or bytecode (it is dead easy to write a shitty compiler that produces stupid assembly or bytecode) * Runtime performance on tight loops (this is directly tied to cost when running on something like AWS Lambda, and code that performs well means you need to upgrade your hardware less often) * Lines of code required to achieve a given goal. Less is obviously better, when you understand that more code = more complexity, and that more complexity = higher likelihood of bugs. Also, if there is enough boilerplate code to break these guidelines, then what is that code doing, except slowing development times and slowing execution times? I can write a method two or more ways and know provably which is faster. No one does this! No one looks for hot spots and tries to optimize them. No one profiles anything if performance is deemed "good" or "not a problem." There is a lot of CPU time to be saved, a lot of RAM usage and cache optimization that no one does because they believe that their work is above being challenged, even by themselves. This world is insane.
jrobn 7y ago
Languages are tools to codify behaviors. The fact that we spend so much time debating which tool is better instead of “building bridges”, is why I left this industry. Just look at the web front end. Absolute cluster fuck.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 7y ago
  Well, languages are indeed different and some are better for the task than others. And bridges do fall sometimes, so it's worth to reflect on why and how to prevent it.
generatorguy 7y ago
Until software engineers are personably liable for their work like civil and mechanical engineers are and have to carry insurance because they will get sued for negligence if there are issues, it’s not professional engineering.
- wahern 7y ago
  Software engineers are personally liable for their work. It's just that it's much more difficult to prove the various elements of negligence in the software realm, which makes litigation costly and uncertain. How negligent is an arithmetic overflow in a free software library that causes the loss of # of ads clicked for 10,000 Facebook users? Could the developer have foreseen the use case? What's the value of that loss? An arithmetic bug in a flight safety system or financial trading platform? Your odds of being successfully sued just went up astronomically as it's much easier to show negligence and put a dollar figure to damages. Professional licensing regimes are principally designed to prevent negligence by a priori preventing people from holding themselves out as capable of performing some task. In terms of legal liability all they really do is restrict the extent to which you can limit your liability contractually. That's important in business and in professional services (doctor, lawyer, etc), but for downstream users who suffer damages there was never a contract involved, anyhow.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Some of them are, just not on every country. Here are the examples for Portugal and Germany. https://www.ordemengenheiros.pt/pt/a-ordem/colegios-e-especialidades/informatica/ https://www.ordemengenheiros.pt/pt/a-ordem/colegios-e-especi... https://www.vdi.de/ https://www.vdi.de/ Although you can get by without the admission exam, some kind of state projects do require it for any engineer putting their name on the contract assignment.
dasil003 7y ago
Software engineering is neither science nor art, it’s a craft; one where the raw materials are pure arbitrary logic and data, and therefore having much broader scope than crafts tied to physical materials, but a craft nonetheless.
de_watcher 7y ago
As others have mentioned, software engineering is not a science, it's a craft strongly entangled with communication: not only requirements-to-product, but also product-to-the-next-developer.

mycall 7y ago

Calling one language better than another is subjective and open to interpretation. Clean might not be as important as critical mass in adoption, letting people more efficiently find people to work on the software.

naikrovek 7y ago
That depends. If you are looking for a language that produces more work for the CPU per line of source code, that is definitely not subjective. Programming languages are not hard to learn for anyone that already knows one or more. Other important metrics no one thinks to measure: * Quality of compiled assembly or bytecode (it is dead easy to write a shitty compiler that produces stupid assembly or bytecode) * Runtime performance on tight loops (this is directly tied to cost when running on something like AWS Lambda, and code that performs well means you need to upgrade your hardware less often) * Lines of code required to achieve a given goal. Less is obviously better, when you understand that more code = more complexity, and that more complexity = higher likelihood of bugs. Also, if there is enough boilerplate code to break these guidelines, then what is that code doing, except slowing development times and slowing execution times? I can write a method two or more ways and know provably which is faster. No one does this! No one looks for hot spots and tries to optimize them. No one profiles anything if performance is deemed "good" or "not a problem." There is a lot of CPU time to be saved, a lot of RAM usage and cache optimization that no one does because they believe that their work is above being challenged, even by themselves. This world is insane.

jrobn 7y ago

Languages are tools to codify behaviors. The fact that we spend so much time debating which tool is better instead of “building bridges”, is why I left this industry. Just look at the web front end. Absolute cluster fuck.

Mikhail_Edoshin 7y ago
Well, languages are indeed different and some are better for the task than others. And bridges do fall sometimes, so it's worth to reflect on why and how to prevent it.

generatorguy 7y ago

Until software engineers are personably liable for their work like civil and mechanical engineers are and have to carry insurance because they will get sued for negligence if there are issues, it’s not professional engineering.

wahern 7y ago
Software engineers are personally liable for their work. It's just that it's much more difficult to prove the various elements of negligence in the software realm, which makes litigation costly and uncertain. How negligent is an arithmetic overflow in a free software library that causes the loss of # of ads clicked for 10,000 Facebook users? Could the developer have foreseen the use case? What's the value of that loss? An arithmetic bug in a flight safety system or financial trading platform? Your odds of being successfully sued just went up astronomically as it's much easier to show negligence and put a dollar figure to damages. Professional licensing regimes are principally designed to prevent negligence by a priori preventing people from holding themselves out as capable of performing some task. In terms of legal liability all they really do is restrict the extent to which you can limit your liability contractually. That's important in business and in professional services (doctor, lawyer, etc), but for downstream users who suffer damages there was never a contract involved, anyhow.
pjmlp 7y ago
Some of them are, just not on every country. Here are the examples for Portugal and Germany. https://www.ordemengenheiros.pt/pt/a-ordem/colegios-e-especialidades/informatica/ https://www.ordemengenheiros.pt/pt/a-ordem/colegios-e-especi... https://www.vdi.de/ https://www.vdi.de/ Although you can get by without the admission exam, some kind of state projects do require it for any engineer putting their name on the contract assignment.

dasil003 7y ago

Software engineering is neither science nor art, it’s a craft; one where the raw materials are pure arbitrary logic and data, and therefore having much broader scope than crafts tied to physical materials, but a craft nonetheless.

de_watcher 7y ago

As others have mentioned, software engineering is not a science, it's a craft strongly entangled with communication: not only requirements-to-product, but also product-to-the-next-developer.