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>> But seriously, it doesn't offer anything enterprise would want. The only thing enterprise managers want is a language that can dumb down the art of programm

by kamaal 13y ago

>> But seriously, it doesn't offer anything enterprise would want. The only thing enterprise managers want is a language that can dumb down the art of programming to a level a programmers can be managed like assembly line workers. And that is what Java does exactly, an IDE that can make a novice and expert work at the same levels of productivity, extremely verbose code that gives an illusion of people building something big(even if its down right trivial). And most importantly programming effort can be accounted like a couple of least important replaceable folks down the hierarchy doing some assembling reusable units of material. Change this scenario, a good technology with merit makes programmers very important and makes managers look like desk clerks. Enterprise Managers don't care a least about type systems, lambdas, or traits or whatever. Most managers don't have a remote clue what those things are. Can the technology enable them to manage herds of programmers dumbed down enough to be managed like sheep? That is all they care.

pron 13y ago
No one (well, other than language designers) cares about traits and lambdas per se. People care about maintainability, performance, productivity, runtime diagnosability etc., and "enterprise managers" care about these things a lot. That is why the whole world, almost, switched from C++ to Java faster than it's taken the smallish Python community to switch from 2.7 to 3.0. I won't go into an argument over verbosity, because Java is indeed verbose (about the same as Go and less than C or C++, that were what many in Enterprise used before). But as to the "assembly workers" kind of thing - it is far more complex than that. First, in no language is a novice as productive as an expert; not in Java, not in C and not in Haskell. Second, lots of enterprise projects are far from trivial. Some projects are so damn big that no matter what language you use, it's gonna take a couple of years, several million LOC, and at least several dozen developers, if not more than a few hundreds. Once that's the case, productivity means something else entirely, and yes, planning for team members coming and going is part of it; I think that in that respect Java hit a sweet spot. Obviously, it could be made better; it could be modernized. Personally, I also believe that the JVM is such a great polyglot platform, that projects should be written in several languages – yes, even in the enterprise. Not all enterprise managers are stupid, and there are good reasons your bank doesn't run on Ruby or Python. Enterprise software technology changes all the time – yes, some of it is due to excellent sales team, but some of it is based on merit. You wouldn't expect that software technologies that are good for constantly pivoting SV startups would be equally good for running banks; or aircraft carriers. The requirements are just too different. Python has its place, as does Java. It's just not always the same place.

by kamaal 13y ago

pron 13y ago

No one (well, other than language designers) cares about traits and lambdas per se. People care about maintainability, performance, productivity, runtime diagnosability etc., and "enterprise managers" care about these things a lot. That is why the whole world, almost, switched from C++ to Java faster than it's taken the smallish Python community to switch from 2.7 to 3.0. I won't go into an argument over verbosity, because Java is indeed verbose (about the same as Go and less than C or C++, that were what many in Enterprise used before). But as to the "assembly workers" kind of thing - it is far more complex than that. First, in no language is a novice as productive as an expert; not in Java, not in C and not in Haskell. Second, lots of enterprise projects are far from trivial. Some projects are so damn big that no matter what language you use, it's gonna take a couple of years, several million LOC, and at least several dozen developers, if not more than a few hundreds. Once that's the case, productivity means something else entirely, and yes, planning for team members coming and going is part of it; I think that in that respect Java hit a sweet spot. Obviously, it could be made better; it could be modernized. Personally, I also believe that the JVM is such a great polyglot platform, that projects should be written in several languages – yes, even in the enterprise. Not all enterprise managers are stupid, and there are good reasons your bank doesn't run on Ruby or Python. Enterprise software technology changes all the time – yes, some of it is due to excellent sales team, but some of it is based on merit. You wouldn't expect that software technologies that are good for constantly pivoting SV startups would be equally good for running banks; or aircraft carriers. The requirements are just too different. Python has its place, as does Java. It's just not always the same place.