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Well, we seem to agree that some languages are better suited for some domains. So I'm not entirely certain what we're disagreeing upon. My thesis is that you n
by Yoric 4y ago
Well, we seem to agree that some languages are better suited for some domains. So I'm not entirely certain what we're disagreeing upon.
My thesis is that you need to pick the right language for the task and that language evolution regularly produces languages that are an order of magnitude better at some tasks than previous languages. To pick an extreme example, I doubt that you're going to code your next relational storage with pure C. You'll most likely use some SQL (or a competitor) somewhere in the stack.
And of course, as I believe we agree, the ecosystem matters a lot. In many, but not all, cases, it matters more than the language.
As usual, development is a matter of tradeoffs.
- kaba0 4y agoI think the biggest differentiator is ecosystem. If you don’t count that, then there really is no evidence of any significant difference between any two managed languages. There may be a bit more in systems programming, but that itself is a niche.
- Yoric 4y agoEcosystem is a huge differentiator. But then, again, there are things for which some languages are infinitely better than some others. As everything in development, it's a tradeoff. I have written system code in JavaScript (calling directly into libc or kernel32.dll methods) and I don't want to ever do it again. I have written compiler code in C++ and the code was orders of magnitude worse than it would have been in a functional programming language. I have written database code (the actual dbms, not using a database) in both OCaml and Rust and I'd really prefer using SQL (or some layer on top of it), rather than reinventing it. etc.