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How I decide between many programming languages

drewdevault.com

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Re: How I decide between many programming languages

#51

Post by Hitton »

undecisive wrote: post #3

Interesting! I'd have put PHP and C++ at the very top of the list, then reverse the whole list. As a rule, I'd much rather start with a language that makes it easy to spot massive vulnerabilities, and then move towards a speedier and more volatile language where needed.

>I'd have put PHP and C++ at the very top of the list, then reverse the whole list.

I know what you probably meant, but if you put them at the very top of the list and then reverse it whole, they'll end up at the bottom again. Just saying.

Re: How I decide between many programming languages

#52

Post by TurboHaskal »

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.

Sadly, hiring managers do not agree.

Re: How I decide between many programming languages

#54

Post by agumonkey »

HugoDaniel wrote: post #44
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 (nextclou…

I'm still a bit surprised nobody ever used PHP as a target (think clojure/jvm, or whatever/js).

There's https://github.com/Scriptor/pharen though

Re: How I decide between many programming languages

#55

Post by ziotom78 »

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…

I agree. Given that I do not like C++ and try to avoid it at all costs, it is unfair to say it does not have any advantage:

- It is available on a very wide range of platforms

- Several implementations are available

- It is updated regularly

- Etc.

Re: How I decide between many programming languages

#56

Post by edejong »

coldtea wrote: post #40
dotdi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is true, it's not an inherent problem of maven, it's an inherent problem of dependency management is f*cking difficult™.

Maven is inherently bad too, though

In which way exactly? Having worked with many, many different package managers, I've come to appreciate Maven's way of doing things. Even though it has many drawbacks:

- XML structure is verbose

- Plugin architecture makes standard behaviour opaque

- Default HTTP with no package signatures is recipe for security problems

- "Stages" seem arbitrary and it's not always clear which stages are performed.

- Community seems to move to newer systems such as Gradle (and SBT for Scala).

But, there are also strengths. The configuration format can be extended easily using the plugin architecture. This provides a huge opportunity to extend the functionality.

It is battle hardened over time, which means it is very stable and it has a huge plugin architecture.

Re: How I decide between many programming languages

#57

Post by undecisive »

Hitton wrote: post #51
undecisive wrote: post #3

Interesting! I'd have put PHP and C++ at the very top of the list, then reverse the whole list. As a rule, I'd much rather start with a language that makes it easy to spot massive vulnerabilities, and then move towards a speedier and more volatile language where needed.

>I'd have put PHP and C++ at the very top of the list, then reverse the whole list. I know what you probably meant, but if you put them at the very top of the list and then reverse it whole, they'll end up at the bottom again. Just saying.

No, that's exactly what I meant! I find PHP to be a bag of confused inconsistencies thrown together. While I have no disrespect to the people who put up with this on a daily basis, I'd never choose it for a new project. Similarly, C++ has never really appealed to me - its idea of OO seems misconceived, and it doesn't seem necessary - my current favourite for this niche is Nim

Re: How I decide between many programming languages

#58

Post by sundayedition »

test1235 wrote: post #24
moksly wrote: post #4

It’s under the “I don’t like line”, but I came away from this feeling like I should look into Ruby.

All the jobs which recruiters send me all day long seems to tell me to look into ruby. Or do loads of people start projects in ruby, then leave for something else?

I don't see quite as many ruby jobs today but they're still out there.

Ruby has been very focused on increasing performance the past few years. A few major teams ran away from Rails because it's really easy to build functional things in Rails that won't scale, which gets attributed back to Ruby performance. I think that was enough to scare people away from using ruby at all

GitHub and Shopify both use Rails, among many others.

Re: How I decide between many programming languages

#59

Post by sundayedition »

Among the other criticisms, Ruby hasn't been hip for a while. Bootcamps started offering nodejs, meetups are more diverse, fewer conference topics on Ruby. One major local conference had such low attendence last year they were going to cancel it this year.

It's a very low quality post.

Re: How I decide between many programming languages

#60

Post by Shish2k »

mister_hn wrote: post #37
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

Tell it to companies such as Zalando (they started with PHP), Facebook, Magento and so on.

Facebook started with PHP - but quickly replaced the standard library, the interpreter, and then eventually the language itself (Hack still looks kind-of-like PHP, but is no longer compatible)

(Working with both vanilla PHP and Hack; I find the latter orders of magnitude nicer to work with - just for XHP alone, I wish I could switch my PHP projects to be Hack projects...)

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