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The Problem Of Developing
A reader writes "ZDNet News is running an editorial about the choice of programming languages for developers today. The author suggests that developers have been left with little choice because all of the current programming languages are essentially the same."
There may be only two choices for making internet apps, but a lot of development is still going on that uses neither .Net nor J2EE, and will continue to do so for the forseeable future.
He needed to make it clear that his scope was only web-based development.
I think this article is basically ZDNet trolling again. After all, the more "controversial" the article, the more hits they get = more ad revenue.
So today's developers will use one of three languages: Java, C# or VB.Net.
Strange, a lot of projects I'm familiar with don't use any one of those languages. I think it depends who you talk to.
I think the author believes in two common fallacies:
I'm sure the argument is a lot more valid for big corporations, but they've always been bastions of VB and "4GL's" (even when 4GL was just a marketing term). Basically, /. has been trolled again.
---Windows 2000/XP stable? safe? secure? 5 lines of simple C code say otherwise!
The short editorial is good in that it points out what I suspect most developers already knew (but the marketers would never admit) -- there basically are very few choices offered in terms of "how to do it". As a matter of fact, I know in my part of the country, 95% of Internet application work being advertised is one of two things: ASP/DCOM apps, or J2EE apps (using IBM Websphere, sometimes WebLogic).
That's it. No Web job I looked at in my two months of searching for a job recently specified anything else. No Perl. No C++ unless the job also specified ASP and DCOM. Certainly no Zope, Tcl, etc.
Is this because no one uses any other technologies? No, of course not... but those other approachs lack a strong marketing organization behind them... Programming is as prone to the influence of hype as anything else.
That is what I think is important to assert; that other choices do exist, and it should be our job as supposed experts to investigate all the options. Diversity is a healthy attribute to have... Let's hope the "hyped" languages never succeed in marginalizing all other approaches.
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
Just intriguing to see. J2EE, .NET, etc., all definitely have a place, but it is interesting seeing how many people hop on the bandwagon without requiring the developing company to prove that they eat their own dogfood.
As far as I know (not far?) C++ and C are still widely used in industry. The editor speaks of C++ significance as something of the past: 5-years ago.
GUI skins are discussed as a pretty weak analogy of language interfaces to common runtime libraries. Then of course, the editors example of a GUI skin is Windows XP.
Where I work, C++ is the prime langauge. But then, we're worried about cross-platform development. Maybe that's a thing of the past, too.
Don't waste too many brain cells on this one.
XML causes global warming.
There are still millions of lines of COBOL, FORTRAN. And you can still develop in ADA, LISP, Scheme, etc. Compilers exist.
Sure - Java, Pythol, C# are pretty similar. But what about Lua? PERL? Or CURL?
Sounds like a case of the "good ol' days".
This guy is saying that programmers only have 3 choices; Java, C# or VB. He backs this up by stating Java is what you learn in school these days.
Do not buy into his "reasoning". When I was in school, they were teaching Scheme and Lisp--make no mistake, what they teach is school is not what will build the future! The programmers who only learned what the professor told them became tech support and helpdesk. In those days, to be a 'real programmer' you had to know assembler and 'C'. They made the big bucks, and all major operating systems and applications were written in them.
Today, things haven't really changed that much. Professors are teaching goofy stuff, programmers get a degree but never learned pointers, and the major software is still written in C. The major difference is the success of C++. Yes, there are lots of Java programmers out there, but really fairly few *major* Java programs. The major OS's and applications are still written in C and C++,rather than assembly.
Of course, in the end, if you learn 'right', what language you use is simply a choice, like a carpenter might use a metal hammer for nails, and a rubber hammer for wooden pegs. The right tool for the job. Today, the jury is out on C# being the right tool for anything, and even Java is still a new fangled gadget that hasn't fully proven itself in the toolbox.
Oh my god. Moses handing down tablets from on high? A sweeping statement supported by no figures, no examples. Why will they be dominant? Why will they supplant C/C++?
I would assume that basically all of the Unix market will remain on C/C++/fortran/cobol. Why? Because J2EE and .Net are buzzwords and Unix people have an uncanny nose for sniffing out this kind of crap. And the Unix market is big enough to ensure that your virtual-machine-of-the-month based language "controlling the programming languages market" is always going to be a dream.
And everyone will shop online, and bookstores will go out of business. I'm sorry Matt, haven't you heard of MY object orientated virtual machine based runtime enterprise kidney beans based language? It's called Bollocks# and I think you will be finding it dominating the programming language market this year.
Java is the natural place that people flee to when they can't cope with memory management and pointers. Java is a beautiful language, and the class library is exceptional. But the layers of indirection added through the JVM will always make it slower, and never a language that will replace C++. Just as C++ will never replace C (in the forseeable future), because C++ has its own levels of indirection and safety which slow it down (RTTI, virtual tables, etc). Different tools for different jobs matey, not "one language to rule them all".
Java is easier to learn. Hence you can push out more graduates from Compsci courses with it. Unfortunately, you can't apply those guys to say, kernel programming or embedded systems work because they are clueless w.r.t memory management and the guts of the machine. And when speed is paramount, what is a Java programmer going to do? Turn the hotspot flag on and hope for the best? What if it needs to be *reallly* fast, like "we want operation X under Y instructions on the CPU". You're out of luck. Wrong tool for the wrong job.
Fuck I'm sick of reading this. Another pundit just jabbering off his ideas with only a market analysis background (a poor one at that), not a technical one. I'm sure heaps of IT managers will be reading his column around the world, nodding their heads sagely.
I haven't even had a coffee yet.
Ash OS durbatulk, ash OS gimbatul, ash OS thrakatulk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul! Uzg-MS-ishi amal fauthut burgulli.
Given that Perl imitates Lisp and Scheme more closely with each release, that GC made it into the mainstream with Java, and that Python eventually got lexical scoping, maybe you should revisit your idea about whether what they teach in school is what will build the future.
Interesting perspective..
What I got out of the article was:
Because of CLR, most languages for a common runtime will end up having the same abilities, just different syntaxes.
So, if you know VB.Net, you'll be as 'powerful' a developer as someone who knows C#. But then your C# is probably watered down also.
I think he's saying CLR has it's advantages, BUT keep in mind you may be sacraficing a better tool for the current job.
Kinda like Java.. choose interpreted platform interoperability over compiled speed.
I saw/remember nothing about "All other languages will die.." What would I do with my REXX knowledge? :)
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
I know you weren't dogging C/C++, but I would like to take this opportunity to point out that for embedded development on a microcontroller, or development on any non-PC platform C is a God send. Programming for PCs is only a small fraction of the whole pie.. by small I mean out of "100 million or so PCs shipped each year; (there are) 6 billion processors that go into embedded systems " - Jack Ganssle Just check your Palm, cellphone, microwave, car, sound card, video card, stereo, fridge, ac unit, gas pump, coke machine, etc.. if you don't believe me ;)
The embedded market is enormous and C/C++ aren't going away anytime soon.
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
The most widely deployed Turing Complete machine/language is a close race beteween Javascript and the Wintel machine code, with Java a distant 3rd. Since there is a problem with reliance on machine code for dynamic installation of software over the network, that leaves Javascript the most obvious candidate in which to write other languages. Most people never thought of Javascript as anything but an afterthought to HTML so they might have their eyes opened a bit to the power of Turing Completeness by seeing the TIBET virtual machine written in about a 100K Javascript embeded in a web site's (gzipped) HTML. It gets away with this by dynamically patching (Perl-config style) Javascript incompatibilities and building out from the set of features thereby supported cross-browser.
As I've written elsewhere, this isn't the ultimate language by any means -- but it is a critically needed repair to the foundation of the web that can be followed by more advanced VM's later on.
Seastead this.
When you choose a language it shouldn't be for the operational properties of a language. How many people do you think need the speed benefits of C enough to pay the price for using it? About one in a gazzilion.
The wise programmer chooses a language for it's denotational properties. Such as: how straight forward is it to solve my problem in this language? Does the language provide me with early predicitions as to where the problems with my code are going to be? Does the language have constructs that directly capture the ideas you want to work with?
So you see, having several languages implemented for one back end, so that I can write my lexing routines in PERL, write my AST construction routines in Java, and my compiler in Scheme, ammounts basically to choosing the right tool for the job.
How isn't this appealing?
Won't anyone stop and possibly think: maybe this isn't a ZDNet-FUD story, or a clueless journalist, but maybe a practitioner with a point?
.NET have little relevance here, whereas C and C++ maintain their positions as the "true" languages.
.NET -- lots of training gigs, but very few consulting pilots yet.
.NET national trainer. I don't think I'm alone in looking at these figures. Let me be very clear: The greatness of open source development is that none of this really matters. If you love a language, use it. The marketshare of a language really has no effect on whether you can use it to write good software, it really only speaks of the probability of getting a job or contract using a particular programming language and working as a custom software developer.
.NET in that equation. The author's prediction of a 50/50 .NET/J2EE split is silly. More realistically, by late 2003, mid-2004 I would suggest:
.NET.
.NET may grow to overtake the other languages, but I wouldn't bet on it until 2004 at best, no matter what the hype. It's a conservative industry, and not even Java, the current adoption rate record holder, was adopted as fast as some think .NET will be.
.NET catches on, there is a problem that the JVM or the CLR does not have a design that allows for true language innovation. We're stuck at extracting and sharing "design patterns" to patch all the shitholes we find in our languages instead of inventing new langauges to fix these problems.
.NET. They won't point you to the absolutely horrendous performance problems of porting languages to .NET if they don't walk & talk like C#. This is where the "skinnable language" concept comes from... the CLR shipped with Windows is optimized for statically typed object oriented imperative ALGOL-like languages, C# and VB.NET in particular. You're not going to run Lisp, ML, Haskell, Self, Smalltalk on them with reasonable performance without a) bastardizing the language and b) using the .NET base class libraries & foregoing the libraries that ship with your language (a major hinderence for Common Lisp and Smalltalk, I'd say).
.NET is sealing us into another 5 years of the status quo.
There seems to be a tremendously insular mindset here on Slashdot... Java and
The majority of software developers and software development work gets performed today in large corporations in industries like financial, insurance, manufacturing, utilties, pharmaceuticals, defense, real estate, retail, etc. 90% of this work is effectively about writing something that talks to a database somewhere for operational or decision support (reporting) purposes.
The culture of these companies is tremendously insular with regards to technological change. Here's a quick'n'dirty view of what tools are used generally out there, all IMHO:
up until 1998:
C++ (MFC, COM, UNIX), pick a 4GL (VB, Powerbuilder, Delphi), some Perl, tinkerings with Java, some niche technologies (WebObjects, Smalltalk, Lisp), and mainframe legacy (COBOL, fortran, etc.)
past 1998:
more Java, C++/COM going well, C++ UNIX going legacy, VB holding steady, Perl growing, other 4GLs going legacy, niche technologies being replaced with prior mentioned technologies, mainframe legacy being retrofitted for Y2K
2002:
Lots of Java, steady amounts of Perl & PHP, VB is legacy, C++ is legacy (COM and UNIX), some niche technologies remain but are targetted to be 'sunsetted', mainframe legacy systems in place but some are looking to be replaced with Java systems. Growing interest in
ANSI-C doesn't really enter into the picture. The #1 one criteria for choosing a technology in these businesses (usually) is how easy/quick can it talk to a relational database. Java's past performance problems are largely irrelevant today -- this language is running billions of dollars of transactions a day through thousands of companies. It works, and it's fast enough for most purposes.
You may not agree with this picture, but it has been my experience as a senior consultant to many different companies throughout the world, and working for a company that is a Microsoft
Remember: my assumption is that the custom software marketplace is very conservative in the technologies it chooses because of the maintainance costs involved. So you see less diversity in using niche technologies unless a group with complex needs (i.e. an OODBMS in Smalltalk, or an expert system in LISP) shells out the extra $$ to get it done. Most systems just aren't written that way. If I'm wrong on this, if Goldman Sachs or Johnson & Johnson or Royal Dutch/Shell are really building most of their next projects spread over hundreds, if not thousands of developers -- all with ANSI-C, then I sit corrected.
The author of this article is making an important point, though he didn't qualify it properly enough... language diversity is drying up in the custom software development market..
This year, if you look at "growth", i.e. what languages are being used for new projects, there are only three major players: Java (mainly JSP/Servlet based), VB, and Perl (for backoffice automation), with other scripting languages like PHP and Python and Ruby in Japan doing smaller projects.
In 2003, there will be more
50% J2EE
30% VB, C++, Perl, Python, etc.
20%
Eventually
The problem that Java introduced, and one that will be compounded is that if
Sure, many people in this forum will point to implementations of ML, Haskell, LISP and Smalltalk on
I have a great interest in programming language innovations.... life isn't getting any simpler, and our programming languages are going to have to start looking more like Ruby, Python, Smalltalk or eventually even Lisp if we're going to be handling the burgeoning complexity that's out there. I get frustrated when BigCo's set the agenda with their marketing pushes and the industry sits still for yet another 5 years... until the next hype wave rolls through. We're going to have more failed projects, more long hours, and more stressed-out/cynical developers because language design isn't keeping pace with the rising complexity of problems we're trying to solve.
While Java did a lot to bring some innovations like garbage collection to the mainstream in 1996... we should me moving beyond this... unfortunately and
disclaimer: my opinions, not my employer's. take with grain of salt.
-Stu