The Costs of Programming Language Fragmentation
robert.ocallahan.org
The Costs of Programming Language Fragmentation
1–10 of 167 posts
Re: The Costs of Programming Language Fragmentation
#2That reflects rather well how I feel about the recent DSL craze, specially in the ruby community. It's also how I feel about libraries and frameworks.
Programming languages probably suffer the least from this phenomenon due to how difficult it is to create a complete language, with compilers and all.
In contrast, languages that just extend others often do benefit from existing communities. Take moonscript¹ for example, it's just a new syntax for Lua, so you can use all the existing libraries at no cost. Or take Terra², which can make use of all the C libraries out there and the Lua libraries at the same time.
Re: The Costs of Programming Language Fragmentation
#3"However, I hope people consider carefully the social costs of creating a new programming language especially if it becomes popular, and understand that in some cases creating a popular new language could actually be irresponsible."
Passion isn't fungible and there is zero gauruntee that the person who creates an interesting new language wouldn't have chosen to binge watch Netflix instead.
Furthermore without a crystal ball it's difficult to separate ahead of time which efforts will move us forward in some small or large ways.
The entire premise of this post is flawed.
Re: The Costs of Programming Language Fragmentation
#4"However, I hope people consider carefully the social costs of creating a new programming language especially if it becomes popular, and understand that in some cases creating a popular new language could actually be irresponsible." Passion isn't fungible and there is zero gauruntee that the person who creates an interesting new language wouldn't have chosen to binge watch Netflix instead. Furthermore without a cryst…
> it's difficult to separate ahead of time which efforts will move us forward in some small or large ways.
That's the point: most efforts do not move us forward but instead move us backwards because fewer people are working on the things that matter.
It's a solid argument and it applies to far more of the open source community than just to programming languages, in fact programming languages are the smaller part of the issue, but the argument still applies.
> The entire premise of this post is flawed.
I don't think so. I would not dismiss an article without at least trying to make a genuine effort to understand the point an article makes. The fact is that it takes effort to launch a new programming language beyond just writing some code and the long term commitment should be there if you are going to let other people run their production systems on what you throw into the world.
This doesn't mean you don't get to scratch your itch, it means that once your programming language gains adoption beyond some people playing around with it you can't just walk off and say that it isn't your problem.
Oh, and it is 'guarantee'.
Re: The Costs of Programming Language Fragmentation
#5I understand the concern but it assumes that open-source contributions are a zero-sum game, which I don't think they are. New languages often encourage users to become contributors where they might have remained users in the old language [citation needed]
Re: The Costs of Programming Language Fragmentation
#6"However, I hope people consider carefully the social costs of creating a new programming language especially if it becomes popular, and understand that in some cases creating a popular new language could actually be irresponsible." Passion isn't fungible and there is zero gauruntee that the person who creates an interesting new language wouldn't have chosen to binge watch Netflix instead. Furthermore without a cryst…
> it's difficult to separate ahead of time which efforts will move us forward in some small or large ways. That's the point: most efforts do not move us forward but instead move us backwards because fewer people are working on the things that matter. It's a solid argument and it applies to far more of the open source community than just to programming languages, in fact programming languages are the smaller part of t…
The fact is that it takes effort to launch a new programming language beyond just writing some code and the long term commitment should be there if you are going to let other people run their production systems on what you throw into the world.
From my admittedly limited knowledge JavaScript seems to contradict this claim.
I don't agree with the article either, one could make the same argument for every piece of new code written.
Re: The Costs of Programming Language Fragmentation
#7"However, I hope people consider carefully the social costs of creating a new programming language especially if it becomes popular, and understand that in some cases creating a popular new language could actually be irresponsible." Passion isn't fungible and there is zero gauruntee that the person who creates an interesting new language wouldn't have chosen to binge watch Netflix instead. Furthermore without a cryst…
> it's difficult to separate ahead of time which efforts will move us forward in some small or large ways. That's the point: most efforts do not move us forward but instead move us backwards because fewer people are working on the things that matter. It's a solid argument and it applies to far more of the open source community than just to programming languages, in fact programming languages are the smaller part of t…
> the long term commitment should be there if you are going to let other people run their production systems on what you throw into the world
If you adopted a language that is not mature for production, then you knew the risk when you made that choice.
Innovation in PL happens with these small languages, and it's a good thing.
Re: The Costs of Programming Language Fragmentation
#8It is not just creating a new language. In a company environment you see a huge cost when people want to start using a new language or/and framework.
It comes down to values and what push people forward.
I am not saying one language should be enough. I am saying that for example that even for a company that already has a library of more than a few components built in React a a medium codebase using it, starting using Vue will add a quite large cost. Even if a framework is 20% better in some metrics, having to rewrite some reusable components (assuming they were written well) in another framework is going to sunk a bunch of time. There is a learning curve that people need to go through. Hardly the first time you use a framework, you end up writing the most awesome code in that framework. There are bugs, there may not be a lot of documentation or open source libraries. From an engineering prospective is going to be fun and you are going to learn something new but from a business prospective it is rarely a good decision.
Same thing is probably true when teams in company with a large Java codebase want to switch to Scala.
On the other end when you have a 10x better framework or technology you are better paying attention and make sure you plan a transition sooner than later. For example, I think GraphQl is a order of magnitude better than REST when you consider a whole end-to-end system.
Engineers, especially the smart ones, get bored quickly. Inventing a new largely adopted language or framework is an irresistible calling from inside. Exploring new territories is also another source of growth. It is all about values and the way we go about satisfying them.
Re: The Costs of Programming Language Fragmentation
#9"However, I hope people consider carefully the social costs of creating a new programming language especially if it becomes popular, and understand that in some cases creating a popular new language could actually be irresponsible." Passion isn't fungible and there is zero gauruntee that the person who creates an interesting new language wouldn't have chosen to binge watch Netflix instead. Furthermore without a cryst…
To be the devil's advocate (as in I don't really hold this position but would like to see it debated): Maybe we would be better off if people watched Netflix instead.
Re: The Costs of Programming Language Fragmentation
#10I think this could be mitigated in some cases with better tooling. Many programming languages just make it needlessly difficult to interact with anything that's not part of their ecosystem.
Check out parcel [0], a web application bundler. It has built-in support for lots of different assets [1], with two notable inclusions being ReasonML and Rust! In this blog post [2] they highlight how easy it is to import Rust code from JavaScript.
Another neat example is Objective-C bridging on macOS [3]. The code usually doesn't end up looking very pretty, and it can be brittle at times, but with JavaScriptObjC you can interact directly with all the native APIs using JavaScript. Here's a blog post [4] showing how to write a native app on macOS using JavaScriptObjC.
[0] https://github.com/parcel-bundler/parcel
[1] https://parceljs.org/assets.html
[2] https://medium.com/@devongovett/parcel-v1-5-0-released-sourc...
[3] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/La...
[4] https://tylergaw.com/articles/building-osx-apps-with-js/