Re:The Costs of Programming Language Fragmentation
by pron on Tuesday October 02, 2018 @12:12PM
(#18122965)
> Nobody has claimed that transitioning to a new programming languages doesn't have a non-trivial cost.
I was replying to the argument that the work is not at the expense of anything else because it wouldn't happen otherwise.
> This just sounds like a lot of opinion expressed as if it were a fact.
I think it's pretty well supported. The cost of developing software from scratch has not decreased significantly since ~2000 (there have been gains due to the availability of lots of open source libraries). In the mid eighties, Brooks claimed that no single language improvement would give us a 10x productivity gain over a single decade. While at the time his prediction was seen as overly pessimistic, it's been three decadades and we still haven't gained a 10x boost with all improvements combined (barring, maybe, the availability of open source libraries, which has nothing to do with language improvements). You can see clearly that companies are not migrating en-masse to some new language (as they did with assembly->C or C->Java/C#). Instead, many languages are being used, none so far seems to have a definitive advantage that encourages the majority of the industry to migrate. You do see plenty of claims, but no major bottom-line impact that causes decision-makers to say, "we must use that!" as was the case with previous generations, where, BTW, significant advantages became apparent quite quickly.
I was replying to the argument that the work is not at the expense of anything else because it wouldn't happen otherwise.
> This just sounds like a lot of opinion expressed as if it were a fact.
I think it's pretty well supported. The cost of developing software from scratch has not decreased significantly since ~2000 (there have been gains due to the availability of lots of open source libraries). In the mid eighties, Brooks claimed that no single language improvement would give us a 10x productivity gain over a single decade. While at the time his prediction was seen as overly pessimistic, it's been three decadades and we still haven't gained a 10x boost with all improvements combined (barring, maybe, the availability of open source libraries, which has nothing to do with language improvements). You can see clearly that companies are not migrating en-masse to some new language (as they did with assembly->C or C->Java/C#). Instead, many languages are being used, none so far seems to have a definitive advantage that encourages the majority of the industry to migrate. You do see plenty of claims, but no major bottom-line impact that causes decision-makers to say, "we must use that!" as was the case with previous generations, where, BTW, significant advantages became apparent quite quickly.