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"If, on the other hand, you're interested in enlightenment, academic research or a start-up, the criterion by which you should choose your next language is not
by marceloabsousa 6y ago
"If, on the other hand, you're interested in enlightenment, academic research or a start-up, the criterion by which you should choose your next language is not employability, but expressiveness."
There is a big difference between enlightenment, academic research and a start-up.
For both academic research and start-ups, employability is a very important component:
- Doing academic research on "non-employable" languages decreases the impact of your research and your own employability;
- In a start-up, you want to pick a language where you can be productive with your team members, with an healthy community, and where you won't have hiring problems because you're using an "advanced" programming language.
- TomMarius 6y ago> - Doing academic research on "non-employable" languages decreases the impact of your research and your own employability That is not a metric for choice of language for academic research at all. The academic research itself is a job, paid with public money, and you better not hinder it with your career plans. Most computer science research is not on languages itself, so you need a language expressive enough to allow you study whatever computer science concept you need to study; it's mostly C and Haskell around me, but I can't imagine my friends going into embedded C development - the C they write is very different, as are the practices.
- alexilliamson 6y agoAll the economists working in Stata would like to talk to you about their employability
- TomMarius 6y agoI am not sure what economists at a commercial firm have to do with computer scientists doing academical research.
- marceloabsousa 6y agoI was referring to academic research in software engineering or PL related areas. I think your view of academic research is nice but perhaps a bit naive. Academic research in most countries is filled with pressure from private money to achieve valuable outputs to feed the private sector.
- TomMarius 6y agoHuh, that's not the reality around me, in CZ/SK/DE/AT/PL in EU.
- newen 6y agoIn US universities in machine learning fields, a lot of labs work with private companies or do interships during summer at private companies and the grad students eventually graduate and get a job at the private company. Software engineering research might be similar but not sure.
- DonaldPShimoda 6y ago> Academic research in most countries is filled with pressure from private money to achieve valuable outputs to feed the private sector. This is not my experience working in PL research, personally. Mostly government grants here (US) that are either wholly research-oriented ("Build a cool thing because it improves the research community") or government-oriented ("Develop this technique because it will provide us with better (cybernetic) defenses). Admittedly I'm pretty new, but the funding does not seem generally to come from or be focused on developments for the private sector. I imagine it would be different in compilers, though, for example. That's certainly an area that the private sector has a more vested interest in, due to direct applicability.
- neutronicus 6y agoThere are some groups with large code-bases that will want "employable language" experience (mine was one), but, at least in my field, outside of the groups with big simulation packages used by other groups, the job description is mostly bodging out a nice-looking .eps file and maybe some favorable-looking benchmark numbers any way you feel like.