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An intellectual hackers' site like this one tends to be home to people playing with Scala, Erlang, Haskell, etc. Hacker News in particular was started by Paul
by noahlt 16y ago
An intellectual hackers' site like this one tends to be home to people playing with Scala, Erlang, Haskell, etc. Hacker News in particular was started by Paul Graham, so its seed community had a significant number of Lisp adherents. The startup community in general is biased towards dynamic languages, in particular, Ruby.
All this makes me think that Hacker News readers will tend to be on the leading edge of language popularity. But it is interesting to see the progress of mainstream adoption.
- 3pt14159 16y agoSometimes a language and its community are so focused around flexibility and power that I don't believe the language is meant for widestream adoption. Erlang is really, really cool, but php gets websites built.
- mahmud 16y agoPHP gets websites built. But what use do I have for it if I want to make software? you know, something other than pumping ascii over a socket descriptor?
- kenjackson 16y agoThe toolbelt of even the least experienced craftsman has more than a single tool.
- neckbeard 16y agoCareful, that's a form of heresy around these parts.
- xd 16y agoGive me an example of something you can't do in PHP. The language is turing complete .. your statement makes no sense.
- rbanffy 16y agoGiven the needed supporting technology, you can write a filesystem driver in PHP. With FUSE, you can. What we should be questioning is how pointless would such endeavor be. Like kenjackson pointed out (and, oddly, this time I agree with him ;-)), your toolbox should not be restricted to PHP, however Turing-complete it may be.
- bretthoerner 16y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit
- TimJYoung 16y agoI think the issue is whether one would even want to attempt to develop certain types of software using languages and environments that were designed to be used in a specific way. PHP would certainly not be one's first choice for developing native Windows desktop applications, for example.
- dgouldin 16y agoThe kicker for me was discovering that Facebook's PHP shell (http://www.phpsh.org/ http://www.phpsh.org/) is in fact written in Python.
- mahmud 16y agoAn intellectual hackers' site like this one [..] That article is not about HN, rather, it's a rehash of the recent TIOBE report, itself widely discredited. Besides, HN readership is not that sophisticated, if at all. For straters, DDJ itself is a respected institution in computing (up there with USENIX) and is read-widely by actual programmers, software engineers, and scientists.
- sophacles 16y agoI think you're on to something here, at least about the HN community being at the leading edge of what's cool. Just anecdotal, but I saw that statement in the article of "python surged" and had a WTF moment. Just yesterday I was putzing around with python and Fuse to make a silly filesystem, and found myself thinking "man python should really stop being my go-to language, it's making me seem so old-fashoned". Lately I have had a lot of those thoughts about python. It's my trusty language, and probably my first true love, but this last project and the article was my "python jumped the shark" moment. So, the question now is: I have a crapload of useful tools in python, and I don't want to rewrite them in other languages - has anyone made serious progress into calling into one runtime from another? Kind of like the JVM or .Net worlds, but universal?
- chipsy 16y agoI still use python for my utility scripts. There isn't a "next thing" for the niche yet AFAIK, all the hot activity seems to be in web-application languages(eg. Clojure, Scala, HaXe, Fantom) which don't do a lot to get down-and-dirty on the backend.
- khafra 16y agoIsn't server-side javascript the Next Big Thing for utility scripts? I still use python, because of the difficulties of getting new runtimes approved in $bigco, but I got the impression that's where things were going.
- philipn 16y agoPython "jumped the shark" because more people have started adopting it?
- chromatic 16y agoThat puts things in perspective, doesn't it? There are buzzworthy languages and there are languages the rest of the world uses to get things done.