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You could also summarize this article in one sentence: the choice of programming language is driven by the market and not the opinion of a single person. That m

by haddr 11y ago

You could also summarize this article in one sentence: the choice of programming language is driven by the market and not the opinion of a single person. That means that not always the best one wins, but the one which has most appealing properties. And those are not necessarily the "beatifulness" or some academic aspects, but rather: popularity (and easyness of finding programmers), understandability, availability of 3rd party libraries, productivity and more...

jasode 11y ago
>summarize this article in one sentence: the choice of programming language is driven by the market and not the opinion of a single person. I wouldn't summarize it that way. More accurate would be: "the effectiveness of a programming language is driven by multi-dimensional factors instead of a single factor such as expressiveness of syntax. One's expert usage of a language can lead him to overestimate its overall effectiveness." When people debate programming languages using words like "simple", "powerful", "better", it's not very precise. It's actually misleading. All those labels have multidimensional factors but people discuss them as if they are a single dimension scalar. E.g. "Golang is simple" -- it's simple in keyword count but not simple in terms of implementing a family of algorithms that differ only by type. The paradox of "simple" has contradictory conclusions because that word has multiple dimensions. Therefore, if one's typical use case of Go does not involve templated algorithms, it is perceived as "simple" and one would proceed to evangelize the language as "simple." Same type of analysis can be done for words like "power", "better", "easier", etc. Yes, languages like Haskell/Lisp/Ocaml/F# etc have more expressive syntax but there are other dimensions in creating software that can overwhelm that advantage. This is why PG can have reasonable opinion on the "power" of Lisp but Aaron Schwartz came to a different reasonable opinion[1] and determined Python in his case to be more appropriate for Reddit. Aaron was not stupid and he knew how to write Lisp. To understand Aaron's viewpoint, you have to notice that he's using different dimensions of the word "better". [1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit
- haddr 11y ago
  I agree, but then again, the market accounts for all those "multi-dimensional factors". Maybe what should be added is that there are external and interal factors that decide of which language is better. External factors have been already discussed. Internal ones are those that correspond to the company internal structure, culture, etc. For instance: If you have a team of people writing Java you wouldn't choose Python at all.

by haddr 11y ago

jasode 11y ago

>summarize this article in one sentence: the choice of programming language is driven by the market and not the opinion of a single person. I wouldn't summarize it that way. More accurate would be: "the effectiveness of a programming language is driven by multi-dimensional factors instead of a single factor such as expressiveness of syntax. One's expert usage of a language can lead him to overestimate its overall effectiveness." When people debate programming languages using words like "simple", "powerful", "better", it's not very precise. It's actually misleading. All those labels have multidimensional factors but people discuss them as if they are a single dimension scalar. E.g. "Golang is simple" -- it's simple in keyword count but not simple in terms of implementing a family of algorithms that differ only by type. The paradox of "simple" has contradictory conclusions because that word has multiple dimensions. Therefore, if one's typical use case of Go does not involve templated algorithms, it is perceived as "simple" and one would proceed to evangelize the language as "simple." Same type of analysis can be done for words like "power", "better", "easier", etc. Yes, languages like Haskell/Lisp/Ocaml/F# etc have more expressive syntax but there are other dimensions in creating software that can overwhelm that advantage. This is why PG can have reasonable opinion on the "power" of Lisp but Aaron Schwartz came to a different reasonable opinion[1] and determined Python in his case to be more appropriate for Reddit. Aaron was not stupid and he knew how to write Lisp. To understand Aaron's viewpoint, you have to notice that he's using different dimensions of the word "better". [1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit

haddr 11y ago
I agree, but then again, the market accounts for all those "multi-dimensional factors". Maybe what should be added is that there are external and interal factors that decide of which language is better. External factors have been already discussed. Internal ones are those that correspond to the company internal structure, culture, etc. For instance: If you have a team of people writing Java you wouldn't choose Python at all.