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Refining a language or programming paradigm requires a philosophical or scientific bent. Not much money in that. Most people just want to get a job done and g
by parasubvert 12y ago
Refining a language or programming paradigm requires a philosophical or scientific bent. Not much money in that. Most people just want to get a job done and go home at 5pm.
Edit: Bright side, I think polyglot programming is more popular now than ever in history. In the past you learned one language and that was 20 years of your career before you went into management. Your identity was wrapped up in being a "VB person", "C", "COBOL", or "Java/C# person" or "Rubyist" .
There still is language identity politics but I think Ruby might have been the last of the One True Religions, now the frontier is all over the place between Python, Ruby, Node, Java, Golang, c#, etc.
- coliveira 12y agoI think it is a perversion of computer science that we think ourselves as users of languages, instead of creators of languages. Especially because it is not hard to create a language these days -- we know much more and have better tools than people 30 years ago. Many of the problems that we consider uber-complicated could be relatively easily solved by creating appropriate problem-specific languages: consider web programming, data mining, etc.
- parasubvert 12y agoI'm with you. But it becomes a skills and NIH-attitude issue at scale, where the evolution of science is less of a concern than treating the science as constant for an engineering project. I've seen lovely crafted DSLs that were deemed unmaintainable when the creator moved on, and management cursed the use of them if they weren't already a popular OSS project.
- coliveira 12y agoThe reason is that DSLs are just viewed as "another" burdensome language, instead of a design for codified problem-specific knowledge. A DSL should evolve as we evolve our understanding of the problem. Think about successful DSLs like Mathematica, for example.