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I'm the author. Its not as if I've never heard anyone say how amazing new language X is. That seems to be about the only thing I do hear. I love programming l

by agbell 5y ago

I'm the author. Its not as if I've never heard anyone say how amazing new language X is. That seems to be about the only thing I do hear. I love programming languages and play around with them all the time and have interviewed creators of programming languages. Clearly there is progress being made in the field of programming language design. The article was saying that you can't necessarily take people opinions in the SO survey at face-value when considering programming languages that are still in a honeymoon phase. There are no 15 year old Julia code bases. Once you have taken over a large code base in a language and have the experience maintaining it that is something else.

oscargrouch 5y ago
I think your perspective have all to do with experience. My younger self used to see new languages as magic wands, secret recipes that would make my code lead me to new things and discoveries. Now my modern self understand how naive i was, and that actually man-years, algorithms, experience and resilience are super important, all that of course with a good sense of opportunity and also luck to make the right thing on the proper time (nor before or after). Reading codebases of others, with pearls collected over the years of how to do well some things in particular fields gives you a bigger perspective that as long you are able to choose the right tool for the job, the quality and excelence of the final product will depend much more of this experience than of the programming language chosen. The ecosystem around the language also matters a lot. For instance other languages might be more suitable or performant than Go in cloud, distributed and server computing. But the fact that you will have a great ecosystem giving the language community will make new projects more likely to succeed even if other languages might be better in performance or memory footprint for instance. The most upvoted comment in this section for instance is in denial and trying to validade the hype. Because theres nothing more comforting than feel good emotionally about something, and the people that also have gone through this and know what you are experiencing, that warns you about it, are perceived as enemies. Because you are breaking this "feels good" cycle, so you must be the enemy right? (But the thing gets me a little scared about is that the last hypes have been much more ferocious, reminding a lot religious cults dividing people between the ones that believe and the ones that does not)

by agbell 5y ago

oscargrouch 5y ago

I think your perspective have all to do with experience. My younger self used to see new languages as magic wands, secret recipes that would make my code lead me to new things and discoveries. Now my modern self understand how naive i was, and that actually man-years, algorithms, experience and resilience are super important, all that of course with a good sense of opportunity and also luck to make the right thing on the proper time (nor before or after). Reading codebases of others, with pearls collected over the years of how to do well some things in particular fields gives you a bigger perspective that as long you are able to choose the right tool for the job, the quality and excelence of the final product will depend much more of this experience than of the programming language chosen. The ecosystem around the language also matters a lot. For instance other languages might be more suitable or performant than Go in cloud, distributed and server computing. But the fact that you will have a great ecosystem giving the language community will make new projects more likely to succeed even if other languages might be better in performance or memory footprint for instance. The most upvoted comment in this section for instance is in denial and trying to validade the hype. Because theres nothing more comforting than feel good emotionally about something, and the people that also have gone through this and know what you are experiencing, that warns you about it, are perceived as enemies. Because you are breaking this "feels good" cycle, so you must be the enemy right? (But the thing gets me a little scared about is that the last hypes have been much more ferocious, reminding a lot religious cults dividing people between the ones that believe and the ones that does not)