How I decide between many programming languages • Hacker News Board

Re: How I decide between many programming languages

#41

Post by ncphillips » Wed, Sep 11, 2019, 9:57 AM UTC

jesterson wrote: post #30

arez wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yep, stopped reading after this. How can this be objective if you think that everyone is a "bad" programmer that uses this or that language, wtf. Pros for PHP could be, it's templating capabilities with HTML, easy to use DB interfaces and the entanglement with the web/HTML/web-server in general. Nowadays you don't really write these kinds of apps anymore where your backend returns whole HTML Pages but that doesn't me…

Same. Also I'd add low entry barrier and maturity of interpreter. Of course, this comes at a price. But saying PHP has no pros is quite subjective

Calling it “subjective” is being pretty nice. It’s just an obviously incorrect statement.

Re: How I decide between many programming languages

#42

Post by type0 » Wed, Sep 11, 2019, 9:57 AM UTC

peterkelly wrote: post #16

probablybroken wrote: post #10

Strange that the availability of developers who can actually be recruited for the given languages isn't listed as a factor.

Any programmer worth their salt should be able to adapt to a new language when they start at a new project/company. Hiring processes that target people who know language X are just dumb, except for very short-term/time sensitive work.

Seems like a lot of corporate environment has settled on:

"We hire programmers that can use myriad of different languages (except Lisp off course, no one want's to deal with Lisp) and then you also have to know Java because in fallback situation you'd be useless in their time constraint setting //goodbye" that kind of thing, did I get this wrong?

Re: How I decide between many programming languages

#43

Post by coldtea » Wed, Sep 11, 2019, 9:57 AM UTC

siempreb wrote: post #27

> C++ > Pros: none > Cons: ill-defined, far too big, Object Oriented Programming, loads of baggage, ecosystem that buys into its crap, enjoyed by bad programmers. This is just rubbish. Fair chance the author wrote this with the help of C++ (your OS or browser maybe?). And I enjoy C++ and it's eco system as well, compared to other languages. So that makes me a bad programmer? I'm surprised people are taking this post…

>Fair chance the author wrote this with the help of C++ (your OS or browser maybe?)

Which OS would that be? Most OSes hardly touch C++, except at higher layers than the kernel.

Re: How I decide between many programming languages

#44

Post by HugoDaniel » Wed, Sep 11, 2019, 9:58 AM UTC

koen_hendriks wrote: post #7

"every PHP programmer is bad at programming, the language is designed to accommodate them with convenient footguns (or faceguns) at every step, and the ecosystem is accordingly bad. No, PHP7 doesn’t fix this. Use a real programming language, jerk." This guy seems like a real open minded person who did his research and shared his opinion after making strong points. /s

PHP unique pros:

  - Cheap (almost every cheap/free hosting supports it without any extra config)
  - Easy (can other languages beat this out of the box: `$_POST["name"]` ?)
  - Wordpress

PHP things that are not unique but good:

  - Huge market (if you are into bootstrapping your business, there are lots of opportunities and low hanging fruit in PHP)
  - Lots of big open source projects to customize or work on top of (nextcloud, etc...)

Things that you need in order to appreciate PHP:

  - Have a product mindset

Re: How I decide between many programming languages

#45

Post by mobilemidget » Wed, Sep 11, 2019, 9:58 AM UTC

nice read, could maybe use a section, when to decide not to use any programming language, but just available system tools

Re: How I decide between many programming languages

#46

Post by TurboHaskal » Wed, Sep 11, 2019, 9:59 AM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #22

taivokasper wrote: post #14

It seems Drew DeVault is highly opinionated and the opinions are more than 10 years old.

Drew is also one of the most insanely productive programmers currently, serving as lead developer of Sway, wlroots and SourceHut and as CEO of sr.ht.

While I like and use his work, I do think there are hundreds of thousands of programmers out there that are as productive and have as much impact, just that they don't happen to do open source.

Re: How I decide between many programming languages

#47

Post by probablybroken » Wed, Sep 11, 2019, 10:02 AM UTC

peterkelly wrote: post #16

probablybroken wrote: post #10

Strange that the availability of developers who can actually be recruited for the given languages isn't listed as a factor.

Any programmer worth their salt should be able to adapt to a new language when they start at a new project/company. Hiring processes that target people who know language X are just dumb, except for very short-term/time sensitive work.

It's true that good developers can learn new things, but it can take years to learn the frameworks and ecosystems. I've seen projects fail due to a lack of skilled developers & having to either recruit contractors, or developers without the relevant background. Being a developer on one of these teams can be a real nightmare.

Re: How I decide between many programming languages

#48

Post by TurboHaskal » Wed, Sep 11, 2019, 10:04 AM UTC

tom_mellior wrote: post #38

TurboHaskal wrote: post #23

I have tinkered with dozens of languages, yet, when I can choose a programming language and money is on the line, I always ask the following questions: - Does it have a standard and a good track record for backwards compatibility? - Is it memory safe? (Bound checking, no pointer arithmetic, etc.) - Does the runtime have automatic memory management in the form of a tracing GC? How tweakable is it? - Does it have kerne…

What answers do you come up with for these questions?

No perfect answer yet but I am mostly programming in Go and Common Lisp these days.

I am looking forward to multicore OCaml and maybe I give F# a go.

Re: How I decide between many programming languages

#49

Post by xiphias2 » Wed, Sep 11, 2019, 10:06 AM UTC

actimia wrote: post #33

siempreb wrote: post #27

> C++ > Pros: none > Cons: ill-defined, far too big, Object Oriented Programming, loads of baggage, ecosystem that buys into its crap, enjoyed by bad programmers. This is just rubbish. Fair chance the author wrote this with the help of C++ (your OS or browser maybe?). And I enjoy C++ and it's eco system as well, compared to other languages. So that makes me a bad programmer? I'm surprised people are taking this post…

'there is widely used software written in language x' != 'language x is good' C++ definitely has its uses (and for a long time was best-in-class for many of them) but it is largely being superseded by other options (not necessarily Rust).

Just as an example it's really hard for me to do low level CUDA GPU programming in any other language.

I'm trying hard to use Julia, but understanding its PTX output is really hard for me, and also I don't know how to use the matrix multiplying GPU instructions.

Rust's PTX output is not supported, so I haven't really tried it.

Re: How I decide between many programming languages

#50

Post by agumonkey » Wed, Sep 11, 2019, 10:13 AM UTC

that's one tiny tiny benefit of classical OO, so many languages shared very similar constructs, you could think in "UML" (cough) and not worry about the language per se.