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All of the currently-popular technologies you mentioned were new and immature at one time. The reason we have better languages and tools now than we did 30 year

All of the currently-popular technologies you mentioned were new and immature at one time. The reason we have better languages and tools now than we did 30 years ago is because people are willing to adopt them. If the attitude you're encouraging were followed, these would all have been relegated to unsuccessful research projects and we'd all still be programming in assembly language.

ravi-delia 4y ago
I think that most of the useful work is done by the few, the proud, the nutjobs, who aren't going to listen to this advice anyway. You (for a given value of you) don't need to build a product in Elixir, they (for a given value of they) will, and if they stick with it for long enough everyone else can catch wind and begrudgingly add it to the pile. It's the circle of life! I mean, I don't follow that advice at all, and if you don't want to you shouldn't either, but there's definitely a fair argument that it would be "better" for most cases to accomplish your goal with boring technology.
adrianN 4y ago
The field was changing a lot quicker thirty years ago than it does today and the technology was much less mature. It's natural to become more conservative with technology choices over time.
bmitc 4y ago
And what's interesting about most of the popular languages is that they additionally ignored the state of the art even at the time of their creation, much less throughout their development. It's crazy that things like ML and Scheme were around since the 70s and Erlang since the 80s and Smalltalk since the 80s but basically nothing that made these languages excel at building systems can be found in Java, Python, JavaScript, C++, etc. It's weird to me that it's the stubborn languages that seem to make it through.
- kaba0 4y ago
  Java was originally planned as a “wolf in sheep clothes”, bringing the best ideas of lisp and smalltalk (GC, memory safety, dynamic linking), and selling it to C++ devs. While these were not new per se, they were new to “the average developer”. And I would even go as far to claim that GC is perhaps the biggest productivity/safety boost our industry has seen, single handedly. And they continue to introduce new ML features in the form of pattern matching, ADT, etc. I think sometimes these languages get unfairly evaluated.

ravi-delia 4y ago

I think that most of the useful work is done by the few, the proud, the nutjobs, who aren't going to listen to this advice anyway. You (for a given value of you) don't need to build a product in Elixir, they (for a given value of they) will, and if they stick with it for long enough everyone else can catch wind and begrudgingly add it to the pile. It's the circle of life! I mean, I don't follow that advice at all, and if you don't want to you shouldn't either, but there's definitely a fair argument that it would be "better" for most cases to accomplish your goal with boring technology.

adrianN 4y ago

The field was changing a lot quicker thirty years ago than it does today and the technology was much less mature. It's natural to become more conservative with technology choices over time.

bmitc 4y ago

And what's interesting about most of the popular languages is that they additionally ignored the state of the art even at the time of their creation, much less throughout their development. It's crazy that things like ML and Scheme were around since the 70s and Erlang since the 80s and Smalltalk since the 80s but basically nothing that made these languages excel at building systems can be found in Java, Python, JavaScript, C++, etc. It's weird to me that it's the stubborn languages that seem to make it through.

kaba0 4y ago
Java was originally planned as a “wolf in sheep clothes”, bringing the best ideas of lisp and smalltalk (GC, memory safety, dynamic linking), and selling it to C++ devs. While these were not new per se, they were new to “the average developer”. And I would even go as far to claim that GC is perhaps the biggest productivity/safety boost our industry has seen, single handedly. And they continue to introduce new ML features in the form of pattern matching, ADT, etc. I think sometimes these languages get unfairly evaluated.