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Let me get this straight - the guy that can write high performance scalable async code in erlang/go for the backend, design snappy and responsive UI in javascri

Let me get this straight - the guy that can write high performance scalable async code in erlang/go for the backend, design snappy and responsive UI in javascript or C# and modeling/analytics/stat tools in R,Haskell,Python all with easily defined and usable and language agnostic interfaces is easily replaceable living in a bubble, but write all of this only in Java and you are a programming god? The pipeline was what make Unix great - the ability to chain different small stuff together. Huge monolithic is something I dislike. Personal taste.

nnq 14y ago
I don't mean monolithic, I mean homogeneous / not heterogeneous. The Unix way was great while all the tools were written using a small set of languages and techs (C, Bash, maybe C++ here and there...) because a guy with a certain set of skills could just pop the hood up, get the code, and delve into the guts of any program... now you have "shit, I chose Ruby but that cool lib is Python" or "why is that huge Perl script used to configure and start this Erlang program?". By "Java" (bad example, I agree) I mean any multi-paradigm, multi-platform, general purpose language: it can just as well be Scala on the JVM or Python if its performance is good enough for you and you can put up with the way it annoys you out of your mind if you try to do functional programming in it. All languages claim to be so now but in practice they are not! If you use Haskell for something, Erlang for something else and integrate with some R code by means of some Python or C code, you pay a huge price in increased complexity and you'd better make sure the advantages given by using "the right tool for the job" are worth this price... If you can master the kind of polyglot skills you talk about, great, you're definitely not in a bubble, but this is because you are one of the top 0.1% in terms of "brainpower", not because you used you bp efficiently - imagine what you could do if all the mental energy spend understanding all the little tech details for all those things were focused on solving just one problem and with a smaller number of tools!

nnq 14y ago

I don't mean monolithic, I mean homogeneous / not heterogeneous. The Unix way was great while all the tools were written using a small set of languages and techs (C, Bash, maybe C++ here and there...) because a guy with a certain set of skills could just pop the hood up, get the code, and delve into the guts of any program... now you have "shit, I chose Ruby but that cool lib is Python" or "why is that huge Perl script used to configure and start this Erlang program?". By "Java" (bad example, I agree) I mean any multi-paradigm, multi-platform, general purpose language: it can just as well be Scala on the JVM or Python if its performance is good enough for you and you can put up with the way it annoys you out of your mind if you try to do functional programming in it. All languages claim to be so now but in practice they are not! If you use Haskell for something, Erlang for something else and integrate with some R code by means of some Python or C code, you pay a huge price in increased complexity and you'd better make sure the advantages given by using "the right tool for the job" are worth this price... If you can master the kind of polyglot skills you talk about, great, you're definitely not in a bubble, but this is because you are one of the top 0.1% in terms of "brainpower", not because you used you bp efficiently - imagine what you could do if all the mental energy spend understanding all the little tech details for all those things were focused on solving just one problem and with a smaller number of tools!