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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but the majority of companies in the world with IT department, don't have software as business, rather as a cost center for support their actual business.

Companies like Facebook aren't what the majority of us works on.

So when selling languages to management "look Facebook does it" usually doesn't help at all, what one needs are how that adoption will help those IT costs go down.

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From my research and experiments, I think that ML languages help a lot "getting the specs right". That means that you have more confidence that the code does what you want it to do.

I can see a lot of value for that in non-tech companies that correctness is crucial, like finance, insurance, health...

I love ML languages, my first was Caml Light, OCaml wasn't yet born.

Also share your opinion, and go even further, for me personally IT projects should be accountable just like in many industries.

However my experience in enterprise consulting, with applications written in Excel, or languages that allow for "replaceable programmers", is that business doesn't care if software is the same quality of 1 € shop items, as long it generates the desired output.

it trickles down, slowly. Facebook does it, then SV companies do it, then tech companies globally do it, then everyone else.

Always goes that way.

Not always, hence why you get to situations like that car repair shop in Poland using a C64 to manage their businesses.

As language geek I dabble in every language I can put my hands on.

Yet when it comes to work, it is always Java, C#, JavaScript, C++, SQL, because that is what RFPs allow for.

oh good lord are we pedantic. Yes, not everyone uses the same techs. All i'm trying to say is that we'll see more and more of it.

It's already happening with Elm, Elixir, etc.

No, just not everyone lives on Silicon Valley, or cool cities with startups.

There are zero jobs for Elm, Elixir, .... where I live.

The parent claimed "Elm, Elixer, ..." were the future of the industry. You seem to be asserting that they are not the present.

I am asserting most of us across the world, work in boring companies whose main business is not software development and don't use such languages and never will, yes.

You had only been asserting "don't use such languages", you hadn't really got to "and never will". And I don't know whether I disagree, but you've certainly not made a case for it.

No, you are the ones asserting "don't use such languages".

I am asserting "most of us never will never be allowed to use them at work.", which is quite different point.

Not everyone can relocate just for the pleasure of using another programming language.

But I guess not having job offers on the region one lives is not considered making a point.

> No, you are the ones asserting "don't use such languages".

Oops, did you read that as imperative? It was just meant to be present tense. I didn't mean that you were recommending people not use these languages, just saying jobs aren't presently available in most companies. I missed the ambiguity when I wrote it; my bad.

My point was that the fact that you are not currently being allowed to use these languages doesn't imply that new languages won't be added to the list of "Java, C#, JavaScript, C++, SQL" - there was a time when none of those were on the list. It may be that there is something in particular that will prevent the addition of "these languages" but it hasn't been spoken to.

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