3 ms·

If the non-company-specfic languages cannot keep up with the evolution company-specific languages show they will have a problem getting or keeping their users.

If the non-company-specfic languages cannot keep up with the evolution company-specific languages show they will have a problem getting or keeping their users. I know it takes a lot of investment to build great tools, do marketing, evolve a language etc and currently some large companies seems to think that they get more of what they want by funding their own languages. If someone fund the free languages they same way they will probably evolve faster and get more users. There is also a problem of getting large groups of people and organizations to agree on something. This also slows down progress in some open/free projects. Sometimes it is easier to just decide for yourself.

teddyh 12y ago
There are certainly advantages for companies to develop languages in-house, but there are also, as I wrote, disadvantages for outside developers to use that company-specific language. This lesson was learned long ago about assembly languages and machine code: If you could program the Burroughs Whatzit 220, you could not program the Data General WhizJig 3000, and all the software ecosystem you (and others) had written over the years became obsolete when technology advanced. This was a large part of why programming languages were invented, and why they were always meant to be platform and vendor independent – so that this would not happen again¹. It’s possible that we are due for another generation of developers to make the same journey of discovery of why vendor-specific technology solutions have larger drawbacks than what is initially apparent. ① This is also, incidentally, why Unix proliferated as an operating system – it was and is, for all intents and purposes, a vendor-independent platform for development at the operating system level.

3 ms·

If the non-company-specfic languages cannot keep up with the evolution company-specific languages show they will have a problem getting or keeping their users.

by jbergens 12y ago

teddyh 12y ago
There are certainly advantages for companies to develop languages in-house, but there are also, as I wrote, disadvantages for outside developers to use that company-specific language. This lesson was learned long ago about assembly languages and machine code: If you could program the Burroughs Whatzit 220, you could not program the Data General WhizJig 3000, and all the software ecosystem you (and others) had written over the years became obsolete when technology advanced. This was a large part of why programming languages were invented, and why they were always meant to be platform and vendor independent – so that this would not happen again¹. It’s possible that we are due for another generation of developers to make the same journey of discovery of why vendor-specific technology solutions have larger drawbacks than what is initially apparent. ① This is also, incidentally, why Unix proliferated as an operating system – it was and is, for all intents and purposes, a vendor-independent platform for development at the operating system level.