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6 Languages You Wish the Boss Let You Use

Posted by timothy on from the esperanto-and-atlantean-are-compact-and-efficient dept.

Esther Schindler writes "Several weeks ago, Lynn Greiner's article on the state of the scripting universe was slashdotted. Several people raised their eyebrows at the (to them) obvious omissions, since the article only covered PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl and JavaScript. As I wrote at the time, Lynn chose those languages because hers was a follow-up to an article from three years back. However, it was a fair point. While CIO has covered several in depth, those five dynamic languages are not the only ones developers use. In 6 Scripting Languages Your Developers Wish You'd Let Them Use, CIO looks at several (including Groovy, Scala, Lua, F#, Clojure and Boo) which deserve more attention for business software development, even if your shop is dedicated to Java or .NET. Each language gets a formal definition and then a quote or two from a developer who explains why it inspires passion."

10 of 264 comments (clear)

  1. Language Independent? by Beardo+the+Bearded · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Your programming skills should not be tied to the language you use.

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    ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
    1. Re:Language Independent? by dedazo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Agreed, but even assuming you can become proficient in a given language quickly, there's usually a huge learning curve associated with the library(ies)/runtime. Not to mention the amount of time needed to arrive at the "this is how you actually do it" point for any language.

      I can write a 20-line utility script in Perl or Scheme just fine. Applications are another matter.

      --
      Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
    2. Re:Language Independent? by quanticle · · Score: 4, Insightful

      While your skills should certainly be language independent, it is also true that different languages make different things easy. Otherwise, why would we have so many of them?

      I think the main thing I see is that the old argument, "Scripting languages are far too slow!" has finally been put to rest. All of the up and coming languages cited in the article are dynamically typed, interpreted (or bytecode-interpreted) languages.

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      We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
    3. Re:Language Independent? by steveha · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think the main thing I see is that the old argument, "Scripting languages are far too slow!" has finally been put to rest.

      Well, that was always an oversimplification anyway. Too slow for what, specifically?

      Even today, no one would seriously think about writing a video encoder entirely in a dynamic interpreted language. That's a very compute-intensive application and you can't afford the overhead. But how many of us write video encoders? There are many tasks for which the overhead of a dynamic interpreted language is no big deal.

      Computers are really fast these days, so you can afford some overhead. If your trivial program runs in 0.6 seconds instead of 0.01 seconds, you may not care about the difference. And if you can write your program in 1/10 the time, you may come out way ahead. (And if the program is a one-off, that only needs to be run a few times, all you really care about is how much of your time it took to write the thing and get it correct.)

      steveha

      --
      lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
    4. Re:Language Independent? by zullnero · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I had this discussion with a recruiter the other day that was adamant about me inserting every single language and tool they wanted into every job description I had.

      I said "the situation is very much like a mechanic where I have a wide range of tools I use to solve a problem, but the only thing that anyone cares about is that at some point, I used a wrench for something...without really caring about what the problem actually was."

      Anyone can sit down, surf the web, find some sample code, stick it into a project, and then site that you used said tool in your resume...but it's not about that, it's about how you solved that problem.

    5. Re:Language Independent? by Frater+219 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Your programming skills should not be tied to the language you use.

      Anyone who thinks this doesn't know very much about the diversity of programming languages, I suspect.

      What you say may be true about a restricted set of languages: I would expect a good C++ programmer to be readily able to learn C# or Java; likewise I would expect a Python programmer to be readily able to learn Ruby. But that's because C++ and Java are not very far apart, nor are Python and Ruby.

      But there are plenty of good C++ or Java programmers who would be completely lost in Lisp or Haskell. Why? Because a good Lisp or Haskell program does not break the problem down along the same lines as a good C++ or Java program. They involve a different set of skills. C++ coders do not tend to think of programming as extending the language to fit their problem space; they do not tend to use higher-order functions; they do not necessarily isolate I/O from core algorithm as Haskell programmers must; and they don't have access to anything even remotely resembling Lisp macros.

      Now, you might say that a person is not a good programmer unless they have mastered a wide range of languages with vastly different approaches. But that's a much higher bar than most folks would use to qualify programmers.

  2. Language Independent! by krischik · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Right on! A good programmer will learn any programming language in a fortnight. But sadly average programers don't.

    1. Re:Language Independent! by arevos · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'd consider the minimum for a really good programmer to include at least a project or two's worth of exposure to...

      I'm familiar with languages in all those categories, but I wouldn't consider them all essential. It's important to have a wide range of experience outside the norm, if only because it demonstrates an enjoyment of learning new things. But I don't necessarily think that a programmer's experience needs to be comprehensive for them to be good at their craft.

  3. Wait and see. by LWATCDR · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I remember when ADA was going to be the next big thing. Then it was SmallTalk. I actually used Modual-2 back in the day. C? was never going to take off. It was too big and slow for micro computers and not high level enough for minicomputers. The only people that would ever really find use for it where those few people that used Unix.
    Before that it was PL-1 and Simula. I left out the fourth generation languages that where going to let everybody write their own programs. Oh and programing by making flow charts... Or was it Hypercard that was the future...
    Well you get the idea. Most where really good programing languages but there seems to be a limited number of languages that reach critical mass. I remember Comal which was a great little language on the old 8 bit machines but it only became popular in Europe.
    Oh well we will see what happens this time.

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  4. The lost art by Alzheimers · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you can't write it in a .BAT file, it can't be done.