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Will Online Learning Disrupt Programming Language Adoption?
theodp writes "Back in the day, getting traction for a new programming language was next to impossible. First, one needed a textbook publishing deal. Then, one needed a critical mass of CS profs across the country to convince their departments that your language was worth teaching at the university level. And after that, one still needed a critical mass of students to agree it was worth spending their time and tuition to learn your language. Which probably meant that one needed a critical mass of corporations to agree they wanted their employees to use your language. It was a tall order that took years if one was lucky, and only some languages — FORTRAN, PL/I, C, Java, and Python come to mind — managed to succeed on all of these fronts. But that was then, this is now. Whip up some online materials, and you can kiss your textbook publishing worries goodbye. Manage to convince just one of the new Super Profs at Udacity or Coursera to teach your programming language, and they can reach 160,000 students with just one free, not-for-credit course. And even if the elite Profs turn up their nose at your creation, upstarts like Khan Academy or Code Academy can also deliver staggering numbers of students in a short time. In theory, widespread adoption of a new programming language could be achieved in weeks instead of years or decades, piquing employers' interest. So, could we be on the verge of a programming language renaissance? Or will the status quo somehow manage to triumph?"
So the only successful languages "back in the day" were those taught at "a critical mass" of universities?
Here, I'll start the list of counterexamples: COBOL and BASIC.
Projects use languages, projects need employees, and employees need proven credentials. Inertia will continue to be a huge component of language selection for decades to come. Ruby is the last language to make progress without an already big tech name pushing it and it's already more than a decade old.
Universities start teaching their students languages AFTER they become popular. Java was well established in industry and universities were still teaching Pascal as a first language (an excellent choice), then C. THEN they switched to teaching Java as an intro language. The students who first learned it wouldn't have had an effect on industry for another two to four years after that.
Languages get adopted by individuals, then get used in industry, THEN get taught to students.
Universities do not and should not be teaching programming languages. They teach programming, the general practice. They teach the theory behind programming. They teach math. And they may teach "Programming Languages" as the study of the languages themselves with examples of real languages. But they don't teach "Python 101" or "Introduction to Haskell." A CS student is expected to be able to pick up whatever language needed given instruction in that general type of language (broadly imperative, function, and logical). A given professor may require a specific language because it's convenient to have everyone working in the same language and easier to grade that way, but that need not be what the text uses for the same topics. Indeed, the majority of texts use pseudocode that isn't in any "real" programming language.
Don't count on it. Most people are like me in selecting a course. They want relevant skills. If a course that might otherwise tickle my fancy requires learning B+- or Anchovy_Paste.net I'll keep looking. There's a lot of selection out there now and I have little time for picking up languages on speculation.
...most people that I know are still using traditional languages, so the ones that quickly come will probably go quickly as well. Compare it to Pink Floyd and Pitt-bull.
Yeah, like nobody ever learned LISP, PASCAL, BASIC, Eiffel, Erlang, Haskell, LOGO, or Scheme before there was an internet... Plenty of languages have flourished in academia without having broad industry support. Some exist primarily as teaching languages, others are most appropriate for domains where there's not a lot of practical economic application yet.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
We already have Lisp. All other languages are unnecessary.
Adoption and standardisation of most computing was traditionally steered by the military and space research, not academics. The academics “followed the money” and worked on government funded programmes which steered the research to a “needed point.”
The purpose of existence is to make money.
For fucks sake, stop with the thinly veiled advertising. We're talking about a huge penetration of languages like C, C++, Java and Perl and the like which are still going to require people capable of coding in them. This fucking online Khan Academy crap isn't going to change that, and I'll wager you dollars to donuts the whole fucking thing will collapse under the weight of insanely over-hyped promises and gimmicks.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
We need more high level languages.
"getting traction for a new programming language was next to impossible. First, one needed a textbook publishing deal. Then, one needed a critical mass of CS profs across the country to convince their departments that your language was worth teaching at the university level. And after that, one still needed a critical mass of students to agree it was worth spending their time and tuition to learn your language."
That is not the way it was. I've been programming professionally since the 1970's. We didn't go to school to learn a programming language. If you took classes it was to learn techniques and concepts. Picking up a new language is a trivial thing. Taking a course on a language does not make you a programmer. Language is merely a way to communicate with the computer. New languages and development environments come and go. Good programmers persist and pickup new languages easily to do the tasks needed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_Law_of_Headlines
So, no.
Nobody will learn a new language unless it offers a big advantage over the existing popular languages. In the last 2 decades, that has meant having a particularly useful library or framework (such as CGI for Perl or Rails for Ruby). Why else would anybody invest the time. New languages are a dime a dozen (actually, that's too generous).
Betteridge
With Facebook seemingly half-populated by bots, are these numbers thrown around by these "online universities" really a reliable source? And how many "certified" IT people have you dealt with who were totally clueless?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Coming up with a new language and teaching it to people is a fun exercise, but unless there's proper tools (IDE, build system, support libraries, binding generators, etc.) then forget it.
Professional programmers don't bother with toy languages unless they're just screwing around.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
... and that won't change just because they move online. Even setting aside the fact that the focus is usually on general principles (independent of the specific language used), the choice of language will always be dictated by what they feel will be useful to their students. In other words, they won't pick a new language and hope to drive adoption by building courses around it, they'll pick an established and popular language. (For example, Udacity picked Python; hardly a controversial choice.) The only thing that might change with the move online is the tempo of change: universities won't lag the rest of the world by so much. But the main drivers of language adoption will always be elsewhere.
Non programmers need to understand that the language isn't the problem. Certain autistic persons have issues formulating sentences to communicate properly to those that are well versed in communication. It doesn't matter if they learn 10 languages, if they can't convey their thoughts in one language, they aren't going to do it in another language.
Likewise, with programming, if you can't speak the language of logic, then you can't program. If you can't have the forethought to see holes in logic, then you can't program. Sure, you can write up some stuff that works. But it still isn't coherent in the grand scheme of things. The government, Universities, and corporate management seem to be stuck thinking that we just need more people that know certain programming languages.
When will they learn that programming is a shift in the thought process that a large segment of our population just can't make? Or they won't make unless we start teaching people to be logical and non-ambiguous in life...
The second tier stuff if most useful for RAD. That is visual basic, python, perl, PHP, Ruby. These are mostly scripting languages, and require a slightly different approach. The solution is defined in terms of the capability of the language and the available scripts. This is particularly true with Ruby. These are languages that meet specific requirements for specific purposes. For instance PHP and Ruby are what uses to write a website. Python is quite popular for home grown science applications.
Which is to say that anyone trying to promote a language because it is what they know rather than because it is what is used to solve a particular problem is like a person trying to get their boss to buy a lather for the server room because they really need a lathe for home projects. I would not try to script a website with C. I would not try write a data analysis program in assembly. The computers are simply too fast and we have had 40 years of development of tool that means we do not need to spend a quarter and a million dollars rewriting a GUI. This has always been true. In the 80's we used fortran for number crunching because that was the only language supported by IMSL. We used C for everything else because it ran on everything else.
So online learning is only going to teach students how to use useless tools. Yes I would like to teach people how to use Forth, but what is the point? We can teach students how use Shakespeare, and it would teach them techniques they need to know and would be very motivating for certain students, but where would they use it? Once a student is proficient at programming, and understand the basic concept, time needs to be spent on learning how to to efficiently acquire API knowledge
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
"Back in the day, getting traction for a new programming language was next to impossible. First, one needed a textbook publishing deal.
Yeah, because COBOL and FORTRAN only took off after a mass of publishers got on it. Riiiiight.
Then, one needed a critical mass of CS profs across the country to convince their departments that your language was worth teaching at the university level.
Counter example: COBOL, FORTRAN, C, Java (the later two only took off after the industry was using them a plenty.)
And after that, one still needed a critical mass of students to agree it was worth spending their time and tuition to learn your language. Which probably meant that one needed a critical mass of corporations to agree they wanted their employees to use your language.
Where the hell do you get this stuff. Are you still in school or something?
It was a tall order that took years if one was lucky, and only some languages — FORTRAN, PL/I, C, Java, and Python come to mind — managed to succeed on all of these fronts.
FORTRAN took off because it was the best thing at the time for programming (much better than COBOL.) Java took off without the need of publishers or academia. It was simply taken by the industry. Python hasn't taken off (I love the language, but its usage is nowhere near Java or C#.)
But that was then, this is now.
You don't know what was "then". I doubt you know what it is "now".
Whip up some online materials, and you can kiss your textbook publishing worries goodbye.
What does this even mean?
Manage to convince just one of the new Super Profs at Udacity or Coursera to teach your programming language, and they can reach 160,000 students with just one free, not-for-credit course.
Yeah, because it will be as easy as it was before, right, right, right? Let's build a pyramid of hypotheticals!!!!
And even if the elite Profs turn up their nose at your creation, upstarts like Khan Academy or Code Academy can also deliver staggering numbers of students in a short time.
Yeah, because if up-start elite professors at Udacity or Coursera turn up their noses at your pet project, Khan will surely pick it up. Khan!!!!!!!!
In theory, widespread adoption of a new programming language could be achieved in weeks instead of years or decades, piquing employers' interest.
Because business rely in internet popularity and nothing when investing in effective technology.
So, could we be on the verge of a programming language renaissance?
I didn't know where were in a programming language dark age.
Or will the status quo somehow manage to triumph?"
Somehow this reminds me of Dora the Explorer when she stares at the audience waiting for an answer.
Unless the language adds something revolutionary or is very domain specific, we don't really need anymore widely used programming languages. What we do need is more libraries, frameworks, and APIs for existing languages. Preferably, they would be open source or at least have open specifications so that an open source version can be made. Also, not all problem domains warrant their own language.
As it is, my college classes start out over-crowded and end with about half dropping out (and a few failing because they are too stupid to drop or withdraw).
I'd *love* to take a programming course taught with brainfuck. Pretty sure there'd be at most 3 of us with passing grades.
Lot's of IT work should not be at university level.
First off help-desk / desktop / system admin is not CS
2rd lot of IT stuff needs learning / training at the tech school level / trades level.
3rd 4 years pure class room is way to long to get in to the field and comes with the full load of fluff and filler that comes with a university schooling.
4rd IT has alot of on going education that does not if the university time table.
5rd Tech schools seem to try to jam the university framing of degrees in to there plans so in some lights they are seen as a joke and some times credits don't transfer as the time tables are not the same.
There are a lot of terms here, like inertia and status quo, that miss the real point:
You're making an assumption that the widespread adoption of new programming languages would be better, not worse, for the community. I'm not sure there's data that backs this claim. The high barrier to new languages has created larger pools of people and systems talking to one another; there are advantages to this. There is, essentially, a cost to the system for every new language that hits the ecosystem. There is some optimal number of languages, and there's little reason to expect that number is significantly higher than what we have now. I can see a benefit if online learning programs were to reduce the cost of leaning one of the existing languages. I can also see a benefit if such programs were to increase the number of people programming in those languages. However, the more languages there are, the more difficult it will be to find people who have mastered them.
If I'm an employer, and I'm trying to decide what language my employees should code in, I need that language to be one that both meets my needs and one that is highly adopted, such that, should I need to hire someone, an add online will bring plenty of applicants. However, if the existing body of programmers becomes fragmented among a greater number of languages, it will become harder to find someone who has mastered the one or two languages my company uses.
Where
PP = Total Population of Programmers,
ML = Number of Major Programming Languages, and
COB = Current Overall Benefit,
if PP/ML=COB, you'll need to demonstrate that PP/2(ML) != COB/2 before anyone gets excited about the prospects of the new renaissance.
Perhaps it would be better if universities focused on programming skill and critical thinking rather than having to learn any particular language.
Maybe instead of learning, say, a C variant through all the years of college (which is really good to teach some things, and really bad to teach others), it would be better to use a language that, while not necessarily some type of industry standard, is actually a good tool for teaching a variety of programming techniques and critical thought. What good is it to learn to use a language if you can't program worth a damn?
Back in college, half my intro to programming class bombed out because it focused on how to use C++ instead of how to actually think about programming. Only those of us who had been programming in C++ beforehand were able to get a decent grade.
Shouldn't learning how to program be relatively language agnostic? Sure, you won't get to the fancy powerful tricks of a particular language in the classroom. But if you know how to program, not only should you be able to learn any language (assuming appropriate features and training materials), but you'll be able to pick up all that fancy stuff either on your own, in advanced language specific classes, or from work.
Good grief man! One of the more popular languages around these days is Objective-C! Would you have thought THAT possible ten years ago?
Look at StackOverflow, brimming with questions about Ruby or Python or PHP or Scala.
Look at alternative databases in wide use today that do not use SQL.
Your renaissance has already arrived, any language that has some good practical use does not need a course to gain adoption, just a tag in StackOverflow and a handful of fervent believers to evangelize the use of it.
On a side note, it's depressing the number of dour replies you got right out of the gate. There was a time where futurists were a healthy part of Slashdot, now we are scored and ridiculed. It hardly matters though since we are generally right in the end, so keep the spirits up.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No. Programming languages need two things to become mainstream. First they need a very extensive library of support such as windowing, network, and about 50 other topics. Second they need a compelling reason to use the language itself. The compelling reason could be that the language is so nifty or elegant that it is worth the effort. In procedural languages it is hard to imagine anything better than what we have. In non-procedural languages there may be some new ideas yet to be thought of. Another compelling reason for a new language is marketing suits. Some company has a very cool new product and in order to lock you in they invent a new language to program it. Laaaaaaaaame. Only Microsoft would be stupid enough to try that again (C# was a case in point where they still had the muscle to pull it off.) Google could do it for a special search language but are not that silly.
When will they learn that programming is a shi&t in the tho#ght process that a large segment o& o#r pop#lation j#st can't ma@e??
Most people can realize what can be automated. That's why most people don't like repetitive tasks, that they know could be automated. That's how a lot of so called progress has happened.
but you're forgetting that most things don't need to be perfect to work. if an automatic sorting machine just does an OK job that might be enough, considering that a human might not be able to do any better judging if some apple is red enough or not. That's a problem case where there is no definite logic on what's passable. Much like there's no definite logic on which programming language is passable for wide use.
but this article is total crap and a khan academy advert. khan academy isn't going to change the landscape anymore than any random web page is going to change the landscape for obscure or new programming languages. if it has some merit and is sexy enough then people will use it, but this article somehow assumes that people would like to be force fed a niche programming language down their throats on an online site - if they want that they can go learn snobol today.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Nobody will learn a new language unless it offers a big advantage over the existing popular languages.
I don't think that's true. It just has to be different enough.
The thing is after you use a language for a while you know it's flaws. It's at that juncture that some other language can come along and capture your fancy, all it has to do is address those flaws you find most annoying in a saner way.
The frameworks are kind of a precondition these days though, if you try to work a string over and encounter pain then you are usually gone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Most of those languages will wither on the vine as there is no widespread support for them, no major pieces of software written in them and the skills base is so dilute (10 million "users" spread across 7 billion people? sounds like homeopathic programming - even if they are all connected on the internet) that it's in no employers interests to invest in it.
The languages that are successful are the ones operating systems are written in. The ones that databases are implemented in - that software with a lifespan measured in decades use. Those are the foundation of the IT industry and the languages that will provide most of the employment to developers.
However, so far as novelty goes, the new languages that will be successful are the ones the will permit new ways of working, provide new features and/or solve the new problems that we will encounter.
So learn your trendy new languages - the ones that some professor somewhere gets a nice little kickback from recommending some obscure learning material for. But you're almost certainly wasting your time if you expect to earn a living from it in the years after you graduate.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
C is by far the simplest fo these, but also the most basic
Any language that you have to manage memory in is inherently less simple to learn ( to a starting point) than a language where you do not have to think about memory management.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
One Word: Esperanto
People learn French because people speak French in France.
For programming langauges it's the same.
Programming languages become popular when they come attached to something else that is already popular---and for reasons independent of programming languages. In a nutshell, connecting to operating system facilities which are connected to popular hardware.
If Apple iPhones were programmed in object COBOL, the language would be popular. And after all, few people used Objective-C outside NeXTSTEP/MacOS/iOS. If Apple hadn't bought NeXT for its next operating system, Objective-C would be nearly dead.
That's not the programer's fault and they must do that.
Let's face it, jobs have those ridiculous laundry lists of skills and if you want a job, you better have them. The job market has spoken.
I have never seen a job ad that just said BS CS or equivalent work experience, experience in developing [whatever product or industry they're in.] and left it at that - even though, any competent developer would be able to do the job. They just may need a weekend of intense study of a language if they don't know it already.
For those of us who embrace change, we see this coming flood of new stuff and we say, WooHoo!
Out with the same-old, same-old musty stuff that have been stuck in committees for the past 30 years.
In with the new stuff that smart folks from all over the world are coming up with on a daily or even hourly basis, that deal with today's world not the bad old days, so the rest of us can be more productive and fulfilled.
Seriously. Considering the amount of bitching, griping, moaning and whining I've seen about businesses failing to move to new operating systems and carrying around large amounts of legacy code, it doesn't appear that there's a pent-up demand for brand-new languages. The OP seems to be operating under the assumption that "if you build it, they will come" when it comes to programming languages, but the real world seems to be of a different opinion.
Sea kelp.
We can only hope. Aren't we already getting a language a week, some FORTRAN with capricious syntax changes, others FORTRAN with horrific kluges grafted on? (actually, all with capricious syntax changes).
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Khan Academy is great, but I agree with you that it isn't going to change the landscape of programming languages. Online language courses are everywhere, and have been for as long as the internet has been available to the masses.
Not one of the programming languages listed were a success because 'it was taught to students'. Its arse about face, they were taught because they were successful. Who the hell wants more languages anyway? renaisance? wtf are you talking about? We need better, faster, easier ways to get the job done. Not spewing out more languages for the sake of it. Also if you *did* have some magic new language, why would you want to force feed a bunch of inexperienced students with it? If you come up with a *genuine* significant improvement, be it a language, a technique, a library or whatever real programmers will pick it up and it will soar on its own wings. Look at JSON for a very recent and clear example of this. depsite the MASSIVE investment in XML by big industry and acedemia, some single guy posts a webpage and says 'hey heres an alternative format that works well with javascript' and now half the world is using it.
Is a lot of new languages being used willy-nilly all over the place. It's already a problem, who wants it to get worse?
I learned Awk from some RedHat Unleashed (4.0?) after I graduated. Thanks to that segue, I never really needed to learn perl. I never used Awk during the time I went to college, but I've used it numerous times. On the other hand, I used Standard ML quite a bit in college, but never since.
I've used TCL for modeling neural networks, ported Matlab code to C for improved performance, written code in Ada, developed ASP using Windows-NT emacs. But I don't know lisp.
I'm not sure what my point is, other than that, I think it's really odd how people adopt programming languages, and not clear why a change in University structure would impact that oddness in an meaningful way.
I don't know. Maybe if there were some languages that broke new ground in terms of data abstractions, control flow, basic concepts of how to program, etc., there might be some reason to adopt them.
The last twenty years of language design has simply been a rehash of the twenty years before that. There hasn't been anything interesting out of the programming language world since CLOS and its multi-methods and MOP back in the early eighties. Maybe Erlang's process model from the mid-eighties. And the academic programming language community hasn't done much either, burrowing ever deeper into its own type-theoretic navel rather than exploring pragmatics.
Someone show me a language that beats APL in array processing, C in procedural programming, or Smalltalk or CLOS in OO programming - that could impress me and maybe make me want to learn a new language. Otherwise, I'll go ahead and learn the syntax and libraries, because that's about all that's different about your latest brain fart.
That is all.
s/is a trivial thing/is a non-trivial thing/
Jack of all Languages, Master of None.
...one still needed a critical mass of students to agree it was worth spending their time [and tuition] to learn your language.
Okay, we can remove all barriers except this one. How can you convince a critical mass of people to agree that it is worth spending their time to learn your language? Investing time is really more critical than all the others put together.
Why don't a critical mass of people to spend time learning Tuvan throat singing? Because they aren't interested and/or they don't think it's worth their time. Why do many people spend their time learning english? Because they perceive that is is worth their time.
This is the problem with many "new" languages. The problems that most folks are trying to solve is often not limited by language, but the availability of infrastructure. Let's take Ruby as an example. It isn't the most elegant of languages (although that is a matter of taste), but some folks when through the trouble of attempting to make it useful enough (e.g., gems, rails, etc) to convince some folks to spend time to learn it (like me). From the time it was first conceived until Rails popularized it, that was 10+ years...
One swallow does not a summer make, nor a few web-classes a programming language renaissance.
I only read two books about programming languages, Modula 2 when I was 16 and during university the book about the ICON language. ... all pretty academic languages. And groovy, e.g. I really doubt any Prof is using it as an introductional language. However books are plenty.
All other languages I learned by starting to program in them.
Well, I recently bought a book about AppleScript as it is not that easy to get into.
I really doubt any Prof at an university is judging languages by availability of books.
Haskell, ML, OcaML, Monalisa, Scala, SatherK
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
If the lack of death of the relational database compared to better alternatives is any indication, people are simply stuck in their old habits, and no more so than corporations. Of course, corporations want to know their technology will be supportable in decades to come too.
Do we actually need a renaissance in new programming languages? We've got already a ton of interesting ones which have never been widely used. Scheme, Erlang, Haskell, Sather, and who knows how many more. When we start seeing these widely used in corporations, then maybe there'll be something to talk about.
I beg to disagree.
First, because never was that easy to publish a book. On Amazon and Lulu, one can just submit pretty much anything and sell, no matter how crap it is. On more traditional publishers, people like Versita and De Gruyter has options for publishing peer-reviewed, high-quality books, essentially for free (taking the payments from the sales, instead of the author in advance). On Versita, one can even let the books be accessed for free for the PDFs, while a printed copy would cost.
Second, because a lot of languages had no such privileges, and yet, they prevailed for some time. C was not an academic project, but it conquered academia, for it was the most sensible approach to what it was proposed. Python needed several years to get the status it got. And so we go.
(disclaimer: I work for Versita)
"Most people can realize what can be automated. That's why most people don't like repetitive tasks, that they know could be automated. That's how a lot of so called progress has happened."
My experience is exactly the opposite. When I'm in an intro computer course and say, "If you ever find yourself doing a repetitive task on a computer, then you're using it wrong; try to find a hotkey, or a script, or a batch process, or think if you can program something to do it instead", they look at me like I have two heads. I think most people are comforted by repetitive tasks and feel confident and secure with them.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
No, it will be much like it always has been.
On several points you made I agree, 110%, as follows:
"If you took classes it was to learn techniques and concepts." - by pubwvj (1045960) on Wednesday August 08, @04:49PM (#40922631) Homepage
Absolutely, since in doing so, you learn the "basics" that function in logic and ways of doing things that function in ANY computer programming language (how to open/read-write/close files and permutations therein, string manipulation, & far more - each of which you do or will do, in any programming language).
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"Picking up a new language is a trivial thing." - by pubwvj (1045960) on Wednesday August 08, @04:49PM (#40922631) Homepage
It is, especially after having learned the basics in the "101" level courses, & then picking up "tricks" in courses like DataStructures (still one of the MOST useful imo, @ least - it saves you YEARS of "trial-&-error" mistakes + what types of (for example) sorts work fastest on what kind & size of data, + much more, as I am CERTAIN you know!).
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"Taking a course on a language does not make you a programmer. " - by pubwvj (1045960) on Wednesday August 08, @04:49PM (#40922631) Homepage
Yes - THAT, takes time. It's a different way of thinking, by taking a LARGE problem or goal, & busting it down into manageable LOGICAL parts, then coding those parts to work to accomplish said goal/task.
(Nice part is, you get better & STRONGER @ it, the more you do it, like working out with weights, except for your mind instead of your muscles!)
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"Language is merely a way to communicate with the computer. " - by pubwvj (1045960) on Wednesday August 08, @04:49PM (#40922631) Homepage
Right again - they all pretty much can do the same things (some more than others in some areas, & some BETTER in certain areas as well than others, + vice-a-versa: You learn that some lend themselves to certain tasks, better than others too!).
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"New languages and development environments come and go. " - by pubwvj (1045960) on Wednesday August 08, @04:49PM (#40922631) Homepage
They certainly do...which pretty much doesn't matter, as they all can accomplish the same things (for the most part, not every language can do what others can do, for example, direct pointer manipulation &/or memmgt aren't present in them all... but, again - YOU know this!).
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"Good programmers persist and pickup new languages easily to do the tasks needed." - by pubwvj (1045960) on Wednesday August 08, @04:49PM (#40922631) Homepage
That's the idea, & yes, THAT comes eventually... after a time (for some, faster than others).
APK
P.S.=> I remember 1st learning to code, & I wasn't prepared for it, NOR did I have the mental nature "naturally" for it to be easy for me - I had to learn a "system-of-thought", FIRST... took time, but it came about (& in a strange way, it "changed me" I think as a person in some ways, not ALL good, but mostly). I also recall thinking:
"What kind of people were meant to do this kind of mental tedium and attention to detail that's like dealing with a retarded child (the computer) & how on EARTH do they manage to get it all working?"
Well - you get PAST that, & start thinking that way yourself (you think, or sink) & making it happen yourself, eventually...
... apk
The world was awash in bottom-up programming languages long before they were spread on the Internet. Some guys at MIT even had "The Lambda Papers" (have we forgotten Gerald Jay Sussman and Guy Steele Jr because they don't work at Facebook?). Other than Pascal, which jumped from academia to industry (mostly thanks to Turbo Pascal and the general-purpose PC-comparible computer in the 1980s which allowed anyone to write software, in sharp contrast to today's walled gardens with app stores), most "languages of choice" started small and obscure and were adopted from the ground up by programmers. C is the classic example. While academia was dinking around with Smalltalk and Modula-2, programmers used C.
It's more important to provide a rich suite of libraries such as "CPAN".
Students (and new-grads) aren't realistically going to have that great an influence in most business environments.
Most programmers will happily learn a new language for personal interest but before they start using it professionally, they need all manner of additional features such as support from third party libraries, code analysis tools, IDEs and SCMs, and debugging tools.
That is a steep barrier to entry.