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>My prediction is 10 years from now we'll look at interpreters and language VMs as relics from a simpler time when clockrates were always increasing and energy

>My prediction is 10 years from now we'll look at interpreters and language VMs as relics from a simpler time when clockrates were always increasing and energy was cheap. Funnily enough someone said that exact same thing 10 years ago in that thread: >* Functional programming / dynamic languages will go out of fashion. People still using them will be judged as incompetent programmers by the people who moved on to the new fashionable programming paradigm(s). At the same time, huge corporations will embrace functional programming / dynamic languages and third world universities will start focusing on them in their courses. Wrong then wrong now.

CoolGuySteve 7y ago
> Wrong then wrong now. While pithy, that's not actually an interesting rebuttal. You should elaborate, especially since "huge corporations", namely Apple, Google, and Mozilla (I guess?), are the ones pushing Swift, Go, and Rust, respectively.
- buzzkillington 7y ago
  Huge corporations always push for languages which are brain dead and make developers be as fungible as possible. Unfortunately not all software has been invented yet and writing in such a language is a nightmare. So what happens is that people gravitate towards languages which are pleasant enough to work on to try new ideas in. The progressing of bash -> awk -> perl -> python happened for a reason. Hell we're even seeing people use lisp like languages unironically for the first time in decades.
  - barrkel 7y ago
    Enabling developers of different talents and backgrounds to be productive and contribute successfully, and to scale up in number of separate teams, is a hard problem and doesn't deserve the kind of dismissiveness you give it here. More powerful languages enable talented developers to be more productive individually, but it's hard to teach all the other developers about the new and interesting abstractions that the powerful languages enable, and it's impossible to hire for them directly. This limits velocity. And it's not just huge corporations, it's any company which is trying to scale from 10 to 100 developers; where you're hiring continuously, where there are too many other developers to efficiently rely on ambient learning.
  - lizmat 7y ago
    Maybe the progression is actually bash -> awk -> perl -> python -> raku ? One can wish :-)

CoolGuySteve 7y ago

> Wrong then wrong now. While pithy, that's not actually an interesting rebuttal. You should elaborate, especially since "huge corporations", namely Apple, Google, and Mozilla (I guess?), are the ones pushing Swift, Go, and Rust, respectively.

buzzkillington 7y ago
Huge corporations always push for languages which are brain dead and make developers be as fungible as possible. Unfortunately not all software has been invented yet and writing in such a language is a nightmare. So what happens is that people gravitate towards languages which are pleasant enough to work on to try new ideas in. The progressing of bash -> awk -> perl -> python happened for a reason. Hell we're even seeing people use lisp like languages unironically for the first time in decades.
- barrkel 7y ago
  Enabling developers of different talents and backgrounds to be productive and contribute successfully, and to scale up in number of separate teams, is a hard problem and doesn't deserve the kind of dismissiveness you give it here. More powerful languages enable talented developers to be more productive individually, but it's hard to teach all the other developers about the new and interesting abstractions that the powerful languages enable, and it's impossible to hire for them directly. This limits velocity. And it's not just huge corporations, it's any company which is trying to scale from 10 to 100 developers; where you're hiring continuously, where there are too many other developers to efficiently rely on ambient learning.
- lizmat 7y ago
  Maybe the progression is actually bash -> awk -> perl -> python -> raku ? One can wish :-)