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This is a good point. The language doesn’t have to be good to make money, in fact in can be quite bad. Oddly, while modern development embraces agility, many

This is a good point. The language doesn’t have to be good to make money, in fact in can be quite bad. Oddly, while modern development embraces agility, many things often benefit from small changes, and a bad language has small change built-in. Why? Well, if the language is bad, you have to pay your developers well to retain them, since there are few that want to program in that language. The developer comes aboard because of the money and the challenge. Once they join the company and become a developer in a bad language, there are fewer alternatives for the developer to find another job in that bad language. This means that they have to stay around and get to know that bad language better, making to even harder for the business to hire others to help or replace them. So, the development doesn’t suffer as much from team scaling problems, and change can’t happen as quickly. This isn’t what you want for everything of course. Especially when talking with a VC about a startup. But JS, an ok language, has gotten to a similar level of nonsense through the difficulty and complexity of its rapidly changing ecosystem and changing browsers. And few languages have really avoided unnecessary difficulty over time in their ecosystems.

Quekid5 6y ago
Absolutely. I think we in the IT community should really strive to be better at nuance when discussing these things. I mean, as much as I've seen "Haskell sucks" posts, I've also seen quite a lot of "Haskell solves all your problems!" posts. That's not how anything works in the Real World(TM) when solving concrete business problems -- whatever that business domain may be. Rather, it's trade-offs all the way down. It does get tiresome to read these re-hashes of debates which should have been over already. (EDIT: For anyone wondering, the answer is: It depends.) I think the "tribes" blog post mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25699983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25699983 is very insightful for the meta-level of this discussion. EDIT: Final edit while I can. We see this a lot with "lol PHP" style comments... and all those achieve is a sense of elitism and making people who actually get lots of important work done in PHP feel bad. I don't want that world.
nightcracker 6y ago
> The language doesn’t have to be good to make money, in fact in can be quite bad. In fact, I think that there's an inverse relationship between how good a language is, and how much money has been made with it, on the condition that you have heard of it. Why? Well if you've heard of a language, it's likely because it is a language that has proliferated through the community. The worse a language is the more it must have made people money to 'survive' and proliferate. Think of the worst/ugliest languages you can think of (coming to my mind is Visual BASIC, C++, PHP, Javascript). These are languages that made an exceptional amount of money, and this allows them to survive despite being so bad.

Quekid5 6y ago

Absolutely. I think we in the IT community should really strive to be better at nuance when discussing these things. I mean, as much as I've seen "Haskell sucks" posts, I've also seen quite a lot of "Haskell solves all your problems!" posts. That's not how anything works in the Real World(TM) when solving concrete business problems -- whatever that business domain may be. Rather, it's trade-offs all the way down. It does get tiresome to read these re-hashes of debates which should have been over already. (EDIT: For anyone wondering, the answer is: It depends.) I think the "tribes" blog post mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25699983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25699983 is very insightful for the meta-level of this discussion. EDIT: Final edit while I can. We see this a lot with "lol PHP" style comments... and all those achieve is a sense of elitism and making people who actually get lots of important work done in PHP feel bad. I don't want that world.

nightcracker 6y ago

> The language doesn’t have to be good to make money, in fact in can be quite bad. In fact, I think that there's an inverse relationship between how good a language is, and how much money has been made with it, on the condition that you have heard of it. Why? Well if you've heard of a language, it's likely because it is a language that has proliferated through the community. The worse a language is the more it must have made people money to 'survive' and proliferate. Think of the worst/ugliest languages you can think of (coming to my mind is Visual BASIC, C++, PHP, Javascript). These are languages that made an exceptional amount of money, and this allows them to survive despite being so bad.