Linked by snydeq on Sun 11th Dec 2011 01:35 UTC
Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister writes in favor of new programming languages given the difficulty of upgrading existing, popular languages. 'Whenever a new programming language is announced, a certain segment of the developer population always rolls its eyes and groans that we have quite enough to choose from already,' McAllister writes. 'But once a language reaches a certain tipping point of popularity, overhauling it to include support for new features, paradigms, and patterns is easier said than done.' PHP 6, Perl 6, Python 3, ECMAScript 4 -- 'the lesson from all of these examples is clear: Programming languages move slowly, and the more popular a language is, the slower it moves. It is far, far easier to create a new language from whole cloth than it is to convince the existing user base of a popular language to accept radical changes.'
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Member since:
2011-08-08
The old product is still going and has been bought by new customers and is still paying the bills. If the amount of effort for the rewrite had been spent refactoring the product ... It would probably would have none of the performance problems it currently has.
The only thing that proves is that the rewrite was poorly handled. For every case where a rewrite was a disaster, you have a case where it was a great success and the old version was treated with good riddance.
If you create a new piece of crap, all you have is a new piece of crap. The problem isn't that you made something new, it's that you made it a piece of crap.