Re^4: Business readiness of programming languages

Interestingly I have just read the Paul Graham article about Beating the Averages you mentioned and I don't think that he is right. I belive exceptional programmers can do exceptional work in any programming language (maybe not in COBOL ;) so the fact they beat the competition using LISP does not mean they could not do it with some other language that can fit the domain.

But actually that is mostly irrelevant in my case. When I was thinking about this comparision I was mostly thinking about companies that prefer safe solutions, companies that like words like mainstream and industry standard.

Interestingly just as we speak here there is a poll on CM Crosssroads asking What is your development platform. the original poll gave 3 choices:

Java
.NET
Both

After some feedback the poll was changed and a few other environments were added, namingly

PowerBuilder
Delphi
LAMP

I think we can say Perl is seen as "mainstream" once people will make polls where the 3 basic choices are .NET/Java and Perl (or maybe LAMP)

Comment on Re^4: Business readiness of programming languages

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Re^5: Business readiness of programming languages by dragonchild (Archbishop) on Jul 07, 2005 at 12:45 UTC
I belive exceptional programmers can do exceptional work in any programming language (maybe not in COBOL ;) so the fact they beat the competition using LISP does not mean they could not do it with some other language that can fit the domain. It's not a question of whether or not an exceptional programmer can program exceptionally in any language. It's a matter of which language provides them with the best tools to program exceptionally faster than the other exceptional programmers. You mention COBOL. For writing complex applications on a modern OS, it's pretty much a given that certain languages are worse than others. COBOL vs. Java, for example. So, since certain languages are worse, then other languages must be better. Java vs. COBOL. While it's not a given that there will be a winner, even in a specific realm like web applications, it's clear that there will probably only be 2 or 3 languages/toolsets that simply are better than the rest. And, that group will change over time. Ruby-on-Rails is an excellent example of this. When Viaweb was started, Ruby barely existed. Now, it's one of the top web languages for the cognoscenti, specifically because of ROR. One can churn out amazing applications with little effort on Rails, making it a very productive language to work in. (Perl has Mason, Catalyst (the successor to Maypole), OpenInteract2, CGI::Application, and others to do what Rails does.) My criteria for good software: Does it work? Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?	[reply]

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Re^5: Business readiness of programming languages
by dragonchild (Archbishop) on Jul 07, 2005 at 12:45 UTC

I belive exceptional programmers can do exceptional work in any programming language (maybe not in COBOL ;) so the fact they beat the competition using LISP does not mean they could not do it with some other language that can fit the domain.

It's not a question of whether or not an exceptional programmer can program exceptionally in any language. It's a matter of which language provides them with the best tools to program exceptionally faster than the other exceptional programmers.

You mention COBOL. For writing complex applications on a modern OS, it's pretty much a given that certain languages are worse than others. COBOL vs. Java, for example. So, since certain languages are worse, then other languages must be better. Java vs. COBOL.

While it's not a given that there will be a winner, even in a specific realm like web applications, it's clear that there will probably only be 2 or 3 languages/toolsets that simply are better than the rest. And, that group will change over time. Ruby-on-Rails is an excellent example of this. When Viaweb was started, Ruby barely existed. Now, it's one of the top web languages for the cognoscenti, specifically because of ROR. One can churn out amazing applications with little effort on Rails, making it a very productive language to work in. (Perl has Mason, Catalyst (the successor to Maypole), OpenInteract2, CGI::Application, and others to do what Rails does.)

My criteria for good software:

Does it work?
Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

[reply]