Re^4: Perl Contempt in My Workplace

How commercial companies decide which programming language/s to use is something of a dark art.

Exactly my point. How can they survive in a free market? Shouldn't that "invisible hand" slap them and then an "invisible boot" kick them out of the market when their "black art" did not work?

My guess: perhaps murking the waters, creating a nexus of dependencies and a web for trapping unsuspected clients (none-the-less: they are still idiots to fall for it) is a company strategy which works better (i.e. maximises profit) than choosing the right language(s) for the task and the right people to programme it. If that's true, then the free market, at least its computing sector, is seriously sick. But currently that field is the forefront and the spearhead of the economy.

bw, bliako

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Re^5: Perl Contempt in My Workplace
by eyepopslikeamosquito (Archbishop) on Apr 28, 2021 at 13:15 UTC

Yes, you made a good point, which I didn't address. Sorry 'bout that.

My feeling is that there are many other factors likely to have a bigger impact on a company's financial success than their choice of programming language/s. Had Google (in a different parallel universe) chosen C++, Java and Perl - instead of C++, Java and Python - would they have been more or less successful in the marketplace? Lacking a multiverse and/or a time machine, we can't just rerun the experiment. :)

For the record, I see that flyaps (fuzzily) list the programming languages used by the top 25 company "Unicorns" (top tech companies with a market estimation of over $1 billion) in 2019:

Python: 20
Java: 19
Javascript: 16
C/C++: 15
Ruby: 12
Go: 11
Kotlin: 8
PHP: 7
Objective C: 7
Swift: 6
C#: 4
Typescript: 2
Rust: 2
R: 2
Perl: 2
Scala: 2

Generally, I don't have a lot of confidence in these numbers ... more so because they list "C/C++" as a programming language when there is no such language!

See also "Software Development Methodology Science" section at Nobody Expects the Agile Imposition (Part I): Meta Process for a similarly intractable problem, namely attempting to "prove" that one Software Development Process is better than another (and by how much).

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