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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RE: improve current languages
by Neolander on Sun 11th Dec 2011 15:32
in reply to "improve current languages"
Member since:2010-03-08
RE[2]: improve current languages
by fran on Sun 11th Dec 2011 15:55
in reply to "RE: improve current languages"
Member since:2010-08-06
RE: improve current languages
by l3v1 on Mon 12th Dec 2011 11:30
in reply to "improve current languages"
Member since:2005-07-06
Better to be real good in one or two relevant languages than mediocre in a lot.
If you know what you're doing, the language doesn't really matter ***. As also said above, frameworks and libraries matter a lot more than the language itself. I can spend my time better than learning all language references by heart. If you can be good in a few, then it's ok to be superficial in others. And sometimes it's quite good to be at least superficially knowledgeable in a few others than your chosen ones, gives you insight and good ideas.
Edit: I'm correcting myself:
*** Except when it does, since there are situations where it's imperative to choose one language over the other.
Edited 2011-12-12 11:31 UTC
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2010-08-06
As someone that recently gotten interested in programming and doing a lot of reading on it, these influenced my decision.
Programming is hard to master. You got to have tutorial material, documentation, cookbooks ect.
Better to be real good in one or two relevant languages than mediocre in a lot.
Compilers and platform support.
Are there people who are going to be able to fix your code?
Are the enterprise going to have difficulty finding coders for that language?
Frameworks and IDE's
A publishing house for instance will be more interested in writing a PHP6 book than a new one obscure language.
I also expect a new version of a current language to be much easier to master than a totally new one.
My vote lends towards the improvement of the current languages. Although new language are very interesting.