Re^3: Perl Contempt in My Workplace

I got a bit disappointed seeing that you put Unix shell script in the same league as Windows BAT

Agreed. (Sorry about that, chief :). I hope I can ease your disappointment by singling out Windows BAT as the worst programming language I've ever used. Perhaps only INTERCAL (and its infamous COME FROM statement) can compete with it. Thinking a bit more, Cobol and PHP are also right up there among languages I really hated in the bad old days.

But seriously, isn't profit (and cost-effectiveness) the only factor governing a free-market company? A choice of programming language based purely on style will kill that company off.

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

My opinion on this from ten years ago
a stackexchange question on this topic
Why Create Coding Standards and Perform Code Reviews? (notes that successful software development is a long term activity and, if you plan to be successful, you must therefore plan for your code base to be maintained by a succession of many different programmers over a period of many years; not planning for that is planning to fail).

In its early years, even a company as big as Google permitted just three languages for serious development work, namely C++, Java and Python. I remember an interview with Guido (can't find it now) where he was asked how come Google came to use Python in the first place and he said he didn't know! (and he was a Google employee at the time!).

Comment on Re^3: Perl Contempt in My Workplace

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Re^4: Perl Contempt in My Workplace by Discipulus (Canon) on Apr 27, 2021 at 10:28 UTC
> ..Windows BAT as the worst programming language I've ever used. Finally I have understood the origin of the software quality level: `BAT shit` :) L* There are no rules, there are no thumbs.. Reinvent the wheel, then learn The Wheel; may be one day you reinvent one of THE WHEELS.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^5: Perl Contempt in My Workplace by Bod (Parson) on May 05, 2021 at 21:16 UTC
How commercial companies decide which programming language/s to use is something of a dark art. Companies are as varied as people, perhaps more so. For many companies, their IT systems are a disparate collection of software which was created, or more likely bought in off the shelf, to solve a particular need. Others took a more holistic approach all along but there is always going to be the temptation to feel that something newer might just do the job better. Not just software or languages; the same feeling appears in many areas of life. So ultimately it boils down to the importance placed on IT within a company and the perspicacity of the management about the challenges of developing and maintaining that software.	[reply]
Re^4: Perl Contempt in My Workplace by bliako (Abbot) on Apr 28, 2021 at 08:54 UTC
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	[reply]
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).	[reply]