4 ms·

This gets it exactly backwards, IMHO. It’s all about what Perl needs: more Perl jobs, more Perl classes, more Perl apps. But what drives adoption of a language

This gets it exactly backwards, IMHO. It’s all about what Perl needs: more Perl jobs, more Perl classes, more Perl apps. But what drives adoption of a language are the ways that language satisfies what users and developers need. If you want to drive Perl adoption, don’t tell the world to use Perl, tell the world about problems that Perl is better than any other language at solving.

pressurefree 7y ago
ya he has pearl vision lol... needs to get his i's checks
agentultra 7y ago
Have tried this with Common Lisp and Haskell. I think the biggest factors in adoption are: being in the right place at the right time and app/platform exclusivity. That's a lot harder to overcome these days. I'm starting to doubt if we'll ever see another popular language displace the status quo.
- ghaff 7y ago
  >I'm starting to doubt if we'll ever see another popular language displace the status quo. That sounds a bit the end of progress. After all, Go, Rust, and Swift haven't been around for that long. I might be open to an argument that ecosystem effects (libraries, training, etc.) lead to power law effects. But I'm not sure I believe that. I could equally well believe that the sheer scale of software development today lends itself to a lot of viable niches.
  - thisisnico 7y ago
    The status quo had changed quite a lot in the past 10 years. Anything can happen.
- setr 7y ago
  I disagree -- software development is more fashion-driven than the fashion industry itself. Programming languages are simply interfaces into a particular tech stack. The stacks will shift as the trends come and go, and the languages will go with it. Perhaps the lowest levels of the stack have settled nice and snugly, with little hope for displacement except by extreme measures (cpu archs, kernel/os implementations, etc) but the higher layers are still rapidly changing, and dragging along new languages with them.
  - rubinelli 7y ago
    That's what the industry looks like among early adopters, but most developers wait for clear winners to emerge on new niches before they commit.
    - setr 7y ago
      I'm not sure that's true -- I think most developers use whatever is fashionable in their circle at the time, and then the project gets locked into that tech. In some circles, they're old enough to stabilize: kernel developers are attuned to C, and will rarely consider anything else regardless of option-availability, because their entire ecosystem (and by virtue, culture) revolves around C. C of course was picked in the first place because of the fashion at the time kernel development got into gear. That is, kernel devs got into bed with C before it was a "clear winner", and now they're stuck with it. Ecosystems that are still developing, layered on top of these older more stabilized systems, have the freedom of choice, and they certainly make use of that freedom. And of course, by nature of a non-stabilized ecosystem, most choices made are done before a clear winner exists -- because no clear winner exists just yet. But the choice will stick, unless it was dramatically harmful to the project. The older the ecosystem, the less viable it is to select anything other than the clear winner, because the ecosystem is coupled to that clear winner, and the ecosystem is the fashion.
    - sli 7y ago
      Which is why I write Elm code at home, but Javascript at work. I'm told the latter is the right tool because the company might have to hire someone to maintain it in ten years, and there just cannot be any deviation because any other language would make that ethereal future hire too expensive. That excuse reflects very poorly on the planned future of the company I work for, but I don't think my bosses recognize that. It's apparently less important that our applications are crash-resistant by design of the platform rather than the application itself. I'll admit I'm a bit of a diva with regards to available tools but it's getting really tiresome.
vorpalhex 7y ago
There are a lot of "ideal" languages out there that are overwhelmingly under used - haskell, erlang, etc. Meanwhile, Javascript and Python are eating everyone's lunches. .NET and Swift are doing pretty well too, but JS in particular is derided as a "bad" language with tons of problems, yet it's bursting at the seams with developers. How can this be so? Frankly, it's because you can take a random person off the street and turn them into a decent JS developer in like two weeks. JS may be formally inconsistent, but it's seems easy enough for most people to get it. It's quick to see and get results, so new developers don't get discouraged. If Perl wants to be popular, it needs to attract users on how easy it is. This was one of the shifts Python has made over the years (getting easier for new users) and it continues to grow its userbase.
- cthor 7y ago
  JavaScript got popular because it was the only option for scripting in browser. Newbs constantly trip over its hazardous wires lying all over the floor. It's absurdly daunting, especially once you bring in all the modern libraries full of their own baggage. What you say is true for Python though.
  - Mountain_Skies 7y ago
    Plus many people fall in love with their first language, which is very often JavaScript. In an earlier era this seemed to happen quite a bit with Pascal, likely because it was a common teaching language.
    - julienfr112 7y ago
      I learn computer programming with basic, then Pascal, but only felt in love with python.
    - dehrmann 7y ago
      Guess this is a perk of QBasic being my first language. It's so dead and forgotten and I haven't touched it in 20 years that I just don't care about it. That, and once I learned C, I felt like a real programmer, so there wasn't any reason to go back.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sornaensis 7y ago
Language popularity is almost exclusively driven by the ability for MBA's to hire cheap, mediocre/bad programmers to slash away at garbage heap codebases in said language, while endlessly billing customers for 'fixes/improvements'. If you have a good team with good tools, you have less billing to do and maybe not enough people to justify convoluted management structures and practices. Good languages are fundamentally at odds with how most software companies do business. They don't want to train people, they don't want to do rewrites, and they definitely don't want to hire people who can change jobs at the drop of a hat (highly skilled persons). They want the bare minimum of all of that, and maximum billings.
- solarkraft 7y ago
  ... and now let's talk about in-house development.

pressurefree 7y ago

ya he has pearl vision lol... needs to get his i's checks

agentultra 7y ago

Have tried this with Common Lisp and Haskell. I think the biggest factors in adoption are: being in the right place at the right time and app/platform exclusivity. That's a lot harder to overcome these days. I'm starting to doubt if we'll ever see another popular language displace the status quo.

ghaff 7y ago
>I'm starting to doubt if we'll ever see another popular language displace the status quo. That sounds a bit the end of progress. After all, Go, Rust, and Swift haven't been around for that long. I might be open to an argument that ecosystem effects (libraries, training, etc.) lead to power law effects. But I'm not sure I believe that. I could equally well believe that the sheer scale of software development today lends itself to a lot of viable niches.
- thisisnico 7y ago
  The status quo had changed quite a lot in the past 10 years. Anything can happen.
setr 7y ago
I disagree -- software development is more fashion-driven than the fashion industry itself. Programming languages are simply interfaces into a particular tech stack. The stacks will shift as the trends come and go, and the languages will go with it. Perhaps the lowest levels of the stack have settled nice and snugly, with little hope for displacement except by extreme measures (cpu archs, kernel/os implementations, etc) but the higher layers are still rapidly changing, and dragging along new languages with them.
- rubinelli 7y ago
  That's what the industry looks like among early adopters, but most developers wait for clear winners to emerge on new niches before they commit.
  - setr 7y ago
    I'm not sure that's true -- I think most developers use whatever is fashionable in their circle at the time, and then the project gets locked into that tech. In some circles, they're old enough to stabilize: kernel developers are attuned to C, and will rarely consider anything else regardless of option-availability, because their entire ecosystem (and by virtue, culture) revolves around C. C of course was picked in the first place because of the fashion at the time kernel development got into gear. That is, kernel devs got into bed with C before it was a "clear winner", and now they're stuck with it. Ecosystems that are still developing, layered on top of these older more stabilized systems, have the freedom of choice, and they certainly make use of that freedom. And of course, by nature of a non-stabilized ecosystem, most choices made are done before a clear winner exists -- because no clear winner exists just yet. But the choice will stick, unless it was dramatically harmful to the project. The older the ecosystem, the less viable it is to select anything other than the clear winner, because the ecosystem is coupled to that clear winner, and the ecosystem is the fashion.
  - sli 7y ago
    Which is why I write Elm code at home, but Javascript at work. I'm told the latter is the right tool because the company might have to hire someone to maintain it in ten years, and there just cannot be any deviation because any other language would make that ethereal future hire too expensive. That excuse reflects very poorly on the planned future of the company I work for, but I don't think my bosses recognize that. It's apparently less important that our applications are crash-resistant by design of the platform rather than the application itself. I'll admit I'm a bit of a diva with regards to available tools but it's getting really tiresome.

vorpalhex 7y ago

There are a lot of "ideal" languages out there that are overwhelmingly under used - haskell, erlang, etc. Meanwhile, Javascript and Python are eating everyone's lunches. .NET and Swift are doing pretty well too, but JS in particular is derided as a "bad" language with tons of problems, yet it's bursting at the seams with developers. How can this be so? Frankly, it's because you can take a random person off the street and turn them into a decent JS developer in like two weeks. JS may be formally inconsistent, but it's seems easy enough for most people to get it. It's quick to see and get results, so new developers don't get discouraged. If Perl wants to be popular, it needs to attract users on how easy it is. This was one of the shifts Python has made over the years (getting easier for new users) and it continues to grow its userbase.

cthor 7y ago
JavaScript got popular because it was the only option for scripting in browser. Newbs constantly trip over its hazardous wires lying all over the floor. It's absurdly daunting, especially once you bring in all the modern libraries full of their own baggage. What you say is true for Python though.
- Mountain_Skies 7y ago
  Plus many people fall in love with their first language, which is very often JavaScript. In an earlier era this seemed to happen quite a bit with Pascal, likely because it was a common teaching language.
  - julienfr112 7y ago
    I learn computer programming with basic, then Pascal, but only felt in love with python.
  - dehrmann 7y ago
    Guess this is a perk of QBasic being my first language. It's so dead and forgotten and I haven't touched it in 20 years that I just don't care about it. That, and once I learned C, I felt like a real programmer, so there wasn't any reason to go back.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sornaensis 7y ago

Language popularity is almost exclusively driven by the ability for MBA's to hire cheap, mediocre/bad programmers to slash away at garbage heap codebases in said language, while endlessly billing customers for 'fixes/improvements'. If you have a good team with good tools, you have less billing to do and maybe not enough people to justify convoluted management structures and practices. Good languages are fundamentally at odds with how most software companies do business. They don't want to train people, they don't want to do rewrites, and they definitely don't want to hire people who can change jobs at the drop of a hat (highly skilled persons). They want the bare minimum of all of that, and maximum billings.

solarkraft 7y ago
... and now let's talk about in-house development.