[bitc-dev] White space

[wren ng thornton]

Ben Kloosterman wrote:
>  >Yes, BitC should try to go gently on its intended audience. I could be
>  >wrong, but I don't get the impression that audience is programmers
>  >who've never moved beyond C++.
> 
> The vast majority of developers I have met are experienced in only a single
> language ( though they may know a few from Unie )  and unwilling to change.
> I suppose the real Q is  whether BitC is focusing on challenging Erlang and
> other functional languages in the system/embedded space or is it looking to
> convert C/C++ devs ? C , C# , Java and C++ derivatives are probably 50-60%
> of  programming and most of the rest is scripting PHP , Python etc.   C and
> C++ are in need of replacement,  it seems to leave a huge audience if you
> just target functional System programmers.  
> 
> A language making 1 % is no big deal as they say in that thread Cobol still
> has more  ,and if you rise up to 1% and then start falling I don't think the
> language can be perceived as successful. 

The reason there are so many Cobol jobs is because of legacy codebases 
that need maintaining. I'm not aware of any companies doing active 
development in Cobol. There's nothing special about that position; there 
are very few companies doing active development in PHP anymore, but 
there are still a lot of PHP jobs because companies need to maintain the 
software that was developed during the big PHP craze.

The degree to which programmers try new languages depends predominantly 
on where they work in the field. In the web development sector it's 
commonplace to completely change languages multiple times in one's 
career. Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby,... That's not because web devs are any 
smarter than other 9-to-5ers. It's because that's the accepted culture 
of web development. Any individual project is likely to be written in at 
least three languages, not including HTML and CSS in all their versions 
and misimplementations.

The multilingualism is the same in system administration, because of the 
countless scripting languages needed to wire things together, configure 
servers, and keep the network running. It's the same in natural language 
processing, which is why I helped start the Joshua project, to try to 
fix that. Joshua is all Java, but what it's replacing is in Bash, Perl, 
Python, and C++, so all of the developers on the team must know at least 
three of those five well enough to understand the performance hacks and 
defensive coding people've come up with over the years.

The only developers I've met who were only experienced in one language 
are now retired. I'm not saying they aren't out there, but they're 
certainly not in any of the fields I've worked in. Which also includes 
WSNs, robotics, and compilers--- so it's not anything special about 
higher-level programming. In any case, I think this thread has ceased to 
be productive. We've no need to rehash the language wars of the 1990s. 
We all agree that C needs replacing, the only question is what the 
people currently using C are like. To answer that would require polling 
organizations currently using C, not debating on an esoteric language's 
mailing list. While we're at it we should finally replace Fortran too.

-- 
Live well,
~wren