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I think this is yet another post that falls into the trap of mistaking HN/Reddit -- fashion publications, really -- for something else. They're GQ or Vogue, not

by pron 7y ago

I think this is yet another post that falls into the trap of mistaking HN/Reddit -- fashion publications, really -- for something else. They're GQ or Vogue, not the New York Times. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22106559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22106559 The vast majority of developers do and always will choose well-established languages. If Go or Rust or Zig or Kotlin or Clojure or Elixir ever become truly popular, by that time they will have become established and "safe" (unless they were Microsoft technologies, but they're not).

loopz 7y ago
Of course, new developers will want to program in Kotlin. Just as per the post, they're not entirely sure of any reasonable why's. They're pretty adamant they don't want to spend their next 40 years ending up as the elder peers tending the same codebase though. :>
cbhl 7y ago
If you agree with this principle, I think the end result is that you choose the most popular language for some window. For banks and airlines, you conservatively pick a large window. At one point that ended up being COBOL. That is slowly migrating to Java now. I suspect it will move to TypeScript in about a decade or so. For new code today, I'd probably pick TypeScript. A few years ago, I'd have picked Ruby. Before that, Python, Before that, Perl/CGI. Before that, Java. Before that, C++. I wonder if at some point the tides will turn back to writing pure-personal-computer-and-no-cloud C/C++ Windows applications.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  You just need to go into life sciences lab robots, factory automation, medical devices, ticketing machines,.... to enjoy doing Windows WPF or C++ applications.
dwohnitmok 7y ago
I doubt that most developers ever choose a language to work on at work. They usually join a pre-existing project that already has enough of an investment into a given language that choosing any other language requires a very compelling reason. To see what languages developers are actively choosing as opposed to going along with, you'll need to measure the proportion of languages used among greenfield projects (and ideally truly greenfield ones, i.e. ones that don't require technical support from other teams within the same org). I don't have data for this, but I'd be surprised if Go wasn't way high up on that list (and on Android, similarly for Kotlin). So does anybody have data on greenfield projects? N.B. I also wouldn't be surprised if the majority of developers hardly ever chose a language for anything, that is I wouldn't surprised if the majority of developers have never started a substantial project from scratch and have only ever joined existing ones. A lot of people prefer to do things other than code in their free time and again, in the workplace, especially in large organizations, it's perfectly possible to only ever work on pre-existing codebases.
- davedx 7y ago
  Only anecdotes, but I've had the opportunity to be responsible for the choice of language in some greenfield projects, usually relatively small line of business applications. My choice is almost always nodejs, lately with TypeScript front ends and my most recent project using TypeScript on the node side too. The reasons for this choice (I've also worked with Ruby, Scala, C#, Java etc): * JavaScript developers are everywhere, it's an accessible language to learn with tons of libraries and a huge community * Nodejs is a simple and great general purpose backend platform that will get you really far for 95% of use cases. It scales well, has a simple concurrency model and simple deployment and ops tooling * Using same language on front end and back end reduces cognitive overhead. My biggest client at the moment uses C# on back end and TypeScript on front, and despite them both being very nice Microsoft languages there's still so many differences
Scarbutt 7y ago
Golang is already a top 15 language, I would call that truly popular.
- pron 7y ago
  Not really. It has a 0.6% market share in the US, and I would assume a much lower share elsewhere: https://www.hiringlab.org/2019/11/19/todays-top-tech-skills/ https://www.hiringlab.org/2019/11/19/todays-top-tech-skills/ I mean, it's popular, but I'm not sure it's a "safe language" just yet. Language popularity obeys a power law of sorts. Go is about 6x less popular than Ruby at the moment, and I don't know if I would count Ruby as a "safe language" either. So far, I haven't seen many Go programs meant to be used for the next, say, 15 or 20 years.

by pron 7y ago

loopz 7y ago

Of course, new developers will want to program in Kotlin. Just as per the post, they're not entirely sure of any reasonable why's. They're pretty adamant they don't want to spend their next 40 years ending up as the elder peers tending the same codebase though. :>

cbhl 7y ago

If you agree with this principle, I think the end result is that you choose the most popular language for some window. For banks and airlines, you conservatively pick a large window. At one point that ended up being COBOL. That is slowly migrating to Java now. I suspect it will move to TypeScript in about a decade or so. For new code today, I'd probably pick TypeScript. A few years ago, I'd have picked Ruby. Before that, Python, Before that, Perl/CGI. Before that, Java. Before that, C++. I wonder if at some point the tides will turn back to writing pure-personal-computer-and-no-cloud C/C++ Windows applications.

pjmlp 7y ago
You just need to go into life sciences lab robots, factory automation, medical devices, ticketing machines,.... to enjoy doing Windows WPF or C++ applications.

dwohnitmok 7y ago

I doubt that most developers ever choose a language to work on at work. They usually join a pre-existing project that already has enough of an investment into a given language that choosing any other language requires a very compelling reason. To see what languages developers are actively choosing as opposed to going along with, you'll need to measure the proportion of languages used among greenfield projects (and ideally truly greenfield ones, i.e. ones that don't require technical support from other teams within the same org). I don't have data for this, but I'd be surprised if Go wasn't way high up on that list (and on Android, similarly for Kotlin). So does anybody have data on greenfield projects? N.B. I also wouldn't be surprised if the majority of developers hardly ever chose a language for anything, that is I wouldn't surprised if the majority of developers have never started a substantial project from scratch and have only ever joined existing ones. A lot of people prefer to do things other than code in their free time and again, in the workplace, especially in large organizations, it's perfectly possible to only ever work on pre-existing codebases.

davedx 7y ago
Only anecdotes, but I've had the opportunity to be responsible for the choice of language in some greenfield projects, usually relatively small line of business applications. My choice is almost always nodejs, lately with TypeScript front ends and my most recent project using TypeScript on the node side too. The reasons for this choice (I've also worked with Ruby, Scala, C#, Java etc): * JavaScript developers are everywhere, it's an accessible language to learn with tons of libraries and a huge community * Nodejs is a simple and great general purpose backend platform that will get you really far for 95% of use cases. It scales well, has a simple concurrency model and simple deployment and ops tooling * Using same language on front end and back end reduces cognitive overhead. My biggest client at the moment uses C# on back end and TypeScript on front, and despite them both being very nice Microsoft languages there's still so many differences

Scarbutt 7y ago

Golang is already a top 15 language, I would call that truly popular.

pron 7y ago
Not really. It has a 0.6% market share in the US, and I would assume a much lower share elsewhere: https://www.hiringlab.org/2019/11/19/todays-top-tech-skills/ https://www.hiringlab.org/2019/11/19/todays-top-tech-skills/ I mean, it's popular, but I'm not sure it's a "safe language" just yet. Language popularity obeys a power law of sorts. Go is about 6x less popular than Ruby at the moment, and I don't know if I would count Ruby as a "safe language" either. So far, I haven't seen many Go programs meant to be used for the next, say, 15 or 20 years.