Re:Whistleblowers: Software keeping inmates in Arizona priso...
by ByteJockey on Monday February 22, 2021 @10:48PM
(#26233613)
>You can optimize along increase-developer-productivity or along increase-potential-developer-population. We chose the former.
I have to ask. How could it be any different?
The vast majority (all?) of the languages are made by devs. Devs work harder and produce better code when they're working on something they want to use.
And the mainstream corporate-sponsored languages (Java, C#, Go) all seem to have started with groups of devs that really didn't want to use C++, which provides roughly the same incentives.
The kind of drive needed to develop and maintain a solid language (to say nothing about an easy to work with language) kind of has to be a passion project, and people aren't generally able to choose what they're passionate about.
Or we did, but then used the resulting easier-to-learn / easier-to-write languages exclusively for web dev, and further specialized them.
There's a mind-bogglingly huge chasm of simple business data processing software that has no performance requirements & no need to be written in an impenetrable language.
Any one of the employees there could probably tell you what should be done in each case, and it's an indictment of our profession that we haven't created a good language / system that lets them do so.
You can optimize along increase-developer-productivity or along increase-potential-developer-population. We chose the former.