The software ecosystem isn't dry
blog.alexrohde.com
blog.alexrohde.com
Some examples that come to mind:
- Postgres. MySQL is great but was eventually obtained by Oracle with a questionable open source future. I think they both originated long ago and evolved in parallel. I wish author would weigh in on which should not have been developed.
- Julia is a new dynamic language that intends to perform with speeds like C. But shouldn't we stick with python because that is the current standard? Wait though, the author says Python is just the same as javascript, ruby, and PHP. PHP was first, so I guess I should be doing my data science in PHP?
I think languages and ecosystems are more analagous to companies/enterprises. They evolve, arise, and die out. Some succeed.
MySql, Postgresql [and the other major players] should all leverage the same standardized syntax (they're close, but not drop-in replacements). In this case when one gets acquired the switching cost is 0. In fact, if they follow the same query contract you could database-dump from one to the other.
Which one shouldn't have existed? Whichiver came second, I suppose. I don't understand why the authors between the two wouldn't cooperate and build one open-source system and fork it if it got acquired.
That's a big claim and I bet the author doesn't know any of these languages.
For any line of python, there's a line or two of PHP to accomplish the same thing (same with javascript).
However you cannot say this for Scala vs Java for example.
Python decorators? What is the counterpart of that in Php?
<?php
// DEFINE DECORATOR
$decoratorFunction = function($orig) { print "decorating $orig"; return function() use ($orig) { $params = func_get_args(); print "\nCalling a function with: " . count($params) . " arguments"; return call_user_func_array($orig, $params); }; };
// DEFINE A FUNCTION TO DECORATE
function someFunction($a, $b) { return $a + $b; }
// CREATE NEW DECORATED FUNCTION(s)
$decorated = $decoratorFunction("someFunction");
$decorated2 = $decoratorFunction("printf");
echo "\noutput: " . $decorated(1,2);
echo "\nOutput: " . $decorated2("\n%s", "cool"); }
But those things are differences, right? Certain languages makes certain things easy and idiomatic. The differences in languages are all about that...
1. Join the languages (so PHP would get that syntatic sugar too) [or preferably never have so many in the first place]
2. Be where we are now, where we have redundant libraries, frameworks, languages, package-managers, version idiosyncrasies, and IDEs for mere syntactic sugar.