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Why Apple and Google Made Their Own Programming Languages
Gamoid writes: This Business Insider article looks into the state of Google Go and Apple Swift, highlighting what the two languages have in common — and why tech companies would bother involving themselves in the programming language holy wars. From the article: "One fringe benefit for Google and Apple is that making your own programming language makes recruitment easier — for instance, since it builds a lot of its own server applications in Go, Google is more likely to hire a developer who's already proficient in the language since she would need less training."
Really. That last sentence proves it. They have no fucking idea what different languages are good for, or not.
It weeds out the people who aren't fan-boy enough to become proficient in your proprietary language before you even interview them. TFA cites a lot of other reasons they wrote these languages. This one got crab-apple picked for some reason.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
This is a bad article; and the submitter, editor, and readers should all feel bad.
Add to that, Go and Swift are pretty small languages. Learning either is something that a moderately competent programmer ought to be able to do in a few weeks. Neither is sufficiently different to other languages that there's a big cognitive jump. The difficult thing is always learning new libraries and frameworks, not learning a new language (well, unless the new language is C++, where after a decade of daily use developers are still not surprised to come across a language feature that they've never seen before).
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is it really impossible for anyone to believe that a language and toolchain can actually
make an organization more productive?
it seems like everyone is so lost in technical marketing that they've forgotten
about actually programming computers
Exactly, this doesn't make sense at all for recruiting, it's actually backwards: using your own programming language makes it far more difficult to recruit, because very few people from outside your organization will have any expertise in the language.
But they don't have a shortage of applicants. They actually want to narrow the field. If that were not the case, Google wouldn't have had (perhaps they still do) such a notoriously difficult interview process.
Economies of scale are critical here. Only a handful of companies are that big, and that desirable as places to work. So for these behemoths the usual logic is inverted. For them, narrowing the field really does "help recruitment"--the semantics of that phrase are inverted when dealing with relativistic money.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
OTOH, it's easier to retain employees who only know "your" language.
Plenty. All of your criteria have little to do with the language and much more to do with the developer. Any properly defined/debugged program is "safe". Any properly optimized program is "performant". "Clear" is just about source code, which means that it's entirely up to the developer.
ISO 9899:2011.
ISO 14882:2014E.
ECMA 334.
Swift is a "lookalike" to all of these in several ways, especially as that list goes on. The list of languages that aren't ancestral to Swift but that have standards could go on for quite a while longer.
Economies of scale are critical here. Only a handful of companies are that big, and that desirable as places to work. So for these behemoths the usual logic is inverted. For them, narrowing the field really does "help recruitment"--the semantics of that phrase are inverted when dealing with relativistic money.
A filter is only useful though if it removes the bad applicants and leaves the good applicants. Filtering by language (/framework) although common is also a very good way to exclude a significant amount of programming talent on the basis that you don't want to give them a few weeks to get productive in your pet language/framework. I've never interviewed (or applied) at either but both Google and Apple seem to have more farsighted hiring practices than that.