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I wonder if perl would be less popular if it was a better language.
by uninverted 17y ago
I wonder if perl would be less popular if it was a better language.
- jrockway 17y agoI wonder what the world would be like if people made their own choices, not influenced by what's "popular" this week.
- yan 17y agoThen people would spend a lot more time electing better choices when they could have spent time working on solving their problem.
- jrockway 17y agoProve it. (Every week I hear about some new asynchronous web server written in Python. Do people really want to spend time working on their own problems, or do they just want to type as much code into the computer as possible?)
- yan 17y agoAll I'm saying that evaluating every research language out there and seeing how well it suits your problem would just take too much time. Getting acquainted with a few well-known languages and a few DSLs or cult-followed languages should be sufficient.
- uninverted 17y agoI don't care which language is popular, I want to know what makes a language popular. I try to choose languages orthogonally to popularity.
- jrockway 17y agoI want to know what makes a language popular. "Jobs."
- uninverted 17y agoThere's a chicken and egg thing here...
- jrockway 17y agoSuch is the reality of a field where the decision-makers are not practitioners.
- bprater 17y agoAre we seriously going to have this argument? This is Hacker News, where most of us don't play the Ford/Chevy game with programming languages. Most of us have used multiple languages and know exactly when to employ the right tool for the job. Perhaps we should have a new rule: if you haven't built a full-scale web app in a specific language, we'd prefer you not comment on it.