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In my experience one of the key differentiators as to viability is who is backing the software. Kx/Q or 8th don't even register on this TIOBE index, and are clo
by scottlocklin 7y ago
In my experience one of the key differentiators as to viability is who is backing the software. Kx/Q or 8th don't even register on this TIOBE index, and are closed source, but are well crafted and perfectly viable because there is a profit making company behind them, and customers whose itch it scratches.
You can really tell when you're using an unviable language; big parts of it are broken, often in subtle ways that you can only find out about after heavy use, and the maintainer doesn't give a shit about your problems, even if your problems should be in the niche the language addresses. There are many open source languages which fit this description; some of which rank in the top-100 or even top-50 in this ranking system. By contrast, something like Awk with a relatively low rank may score poorly but will be viable as long as there are text files.
- CSSer 7y agoBefore I say anything, it’s probably worth noting that I write it for a living. Is it bad that while I was reading this I felt like you might be talking about JS? Or are we talking much more broken?
- scottlocklin 7y agoJS is probably the most viable programming language there is. There was one "starts with letter J" language I was thinking of (along with a few others not starting with J); very fashionable and touted here which is egregiously unviable and broken though. It ain't J or Java.
- CSSer 7y agoOkay, good. I know it's popular to hate on JS, but I think it catches a lot of undue flack. I know it's not perfect, but I also know enough to have at least learned the reasons for most of its shortcomings. I mainly asked because it was my first language, so I often wonder if there really are greener fields out there and if yes, how much greener they actually are.
- scottlocklin 7y agoI was first exposed to it in detail prototyping a machine learning project for Brendan Eich, which is now a part of Brave's browser. JS has obvious defects, but it is amazingly handy and a very good design with good compromises. The tooling and community is excellent of course, though it is a real abuse of JS to try to write ML algorithms in it. But it could have been a language of data science instead of R, had it come in a different era.
- 7thaccount 7y agoJulia? I'm no expert, but it seems to be up and coming.
- dklend122 7y agoIt would be helpful for people looking to invest time in this language if you would just call it out. Or if you'd prefer, we can do it over some private messaging medium. I suspect I know which, but not sure. Also would like to know more about your critiques.
- neonate 7y agoI'd forgotten about 8th. Who are the customers in that case?
- 7thaccount 7y agoI'm just writing software for fun with the free version and it is very enjoyable so far. It doesn't have a huge community, but there are definitely a number of active posters on the forum and the maintainer adds new features all the time and will fix most bugs in hours and is very accessible.
- 7thaccount 7y agoGood point Scott. A more difficult to capture metric would be "what software would you work with if you had the choice and could use whatever you wanted"? I really enjoy writing in array language (like K) and have actually had a blast learning 8th. So either of those would make me happier over the more common/traditional tools that I generally work with.