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> First off, popularity of a language shouldn't be as important as you seem to make it in starting a project. I think there is a minimum threshold to this. I s

> First off, popularity of a language shouldn't be as important as you seem to make it in starting a project. I think there is a minimum threshold to this. I support a large application written in an extremely obscure language (it's basically me and 5 other people on an old yahoo mailing list that make up the entire community). It is terrible. No unit testing frameworks, no http framework for rest calls, no decent UI templating, and on and on. 100% of functionality that I need comes in the form of calls to command line tools. Obviously, Ruby is way past that threshold, so I do not disagree with what you said at all, but just wanted to point out there is a limit. I would not write a new commercial application in any language today that did not already have strong package system. As one person, you can write a few essential modules that you need, but you cannot write all of them.

Solarsail 13y ago
Out of nearly-off-topic-curiosity, does this language have a website(page)? Was it new when you started your project? Have you been able to use libraries from other languages? Or is this really an island of 5 people? (Suddenly that sounds like Gilligan's island for devs)
- morganherlocker 13y ago
  I would prefer to keep the name out of the comments, just to prevent mud-slinging. That said, it is a proprietary language built for a niche data analysis market. It is basically a BASIC variant that probably came out around 95, and the application I now work with was started around that time. It was probably a great choice at the time, as its lack of extendibility was balanced by its performance and feature list in this particular space (GIS). Unfortunately, GIS has traditionally been a huge pain to develop for. The proprietary libraries really sink their teeth in on licensing and the open source modules are notoriously difficult to get up and running, especially in a server environment. In response to this, I began building an open source javascript library that is nearing 1.0, and I am using it in new production work with great success. I chose javascript (node.js specifically) due mostly to performance with IO (huge in GIS) and its awesome ecosystem around npm. I am finding it much easier to build that one tricky library you need than to get the one tricky library for free and build everything else. http://morganherlocker.com/post/turf http://morganherlocker.com/post/turf As to the 5 people... yep about 5-10, and my company employed a few of them. The rest are academics. The 'bus-factor' was pretty high before we switched off of it.

Solarsail 13y ago

Out of nearly-off-topic-curiosity, does this language have a website(page)? Was it new when you started your project? Have you been able to use libraries from other languages? Or is this really an island of 5 people? (Suddenly that sounds like Gilligan's island for devs)

morganherlocker 13y ago
I would prefer to keep the name out of the comments, just to prevent mud-slinging. That said, it is a proprietary language built for a niche data analysis market. It is basically a BASIC variant that probably came out around 95, and the application I now work with was started around that time. It was probably a great choice at the time, as its lack of extendibility was balanced by its performance and feature list in this particular space (GIS). Unfortunately, GIS has traditionally been a huge pain to develop for. The proprietary libraries really sink their teeth in on licensing and the open source modules are notoriously difficult to get up and running, especially in a server environment. In response to this, I began building an open source javascript library that is nearing 1.0, and I am using it in new production work with great success. I chose javascript (node.js specifically) due mostly to performance with IO (huge in GIS) and its awesome ecosystem around npm. I am finding it much easier to build that one tricky library you need than to get the one tricky library for free and build everything else. http://morganherlocker.com/post/turf http://morganherlocker.com/post/turf As to the 5 people... yep about 5-10, and my company employed a few of them. The rest are academics. The 'bus-factor' was pretty high before we switched off of it.