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Comment by ilovecaching | Hacker News Reader

It’s ok to let languages die; we’re just barely scraping out of the infancy of programming. Languages like Java and C++ which have carried us a long way need to evolve into new and better languages that incorporate lessons learned and the next wave of research.

We also know from Google’s paper on software practices that software naturally gets rewritten over time, at a cadence that makes it acceptable to switch languages. So there is really no reason not to have a plan for your business to migrate languages periodically.

Unfortunately the industry seems to be stuck in a rut, and we’re forced to retrofit ancient compilers like horse drawn buggies with plate armor and machine guns on them.

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I see the opposite. I see an industry all too willing to throw away years of hard earned knowledge, experience and purpose built tools in order to chase the shiny tools the popular kids are using.

New tooling often follows a commom cycle of being light weight because they ditched the stuff that looked unecessary. Then slowly a whole ecosystem of plugins and libraries springs up to rebuild the missing tools. Like the bottom bracket tool in a bicycle tool box. I have never used one, but when I need one no other tool would work.

I do truly believe that there is mastery in advanced, long lived tooling and efficiency may not lie with a new language but in truly understanding a comprehensive set of ordinary tools.

Languages also tend to be just the building blocks for the real tools, which are the frameworks and libraries built with them. So I hesitate to throw away my hard earned knowledge only to re-learn another artisan MVC framework written in a prettier language.

I concede that the parade must go on though, and ultimately I have to pay the bills. If precompiled serverside React is where the money is then... so be it.

> an industry all too willing to throw away years of hard earned knowledge, experience and purpose built tools in order to chase the shiny tools the popular kids are using.

Why do you think people in the industry are doing this? There must be multiple factors behind this.

My take on it is that it boils down to the profession being so young. Since it's so young we have a lot of young developers ( < 10 years experience). Programming is an inherently complex task [0]. Couple that with Not-Invented-Here and favoritism of barely working solutions (meaning by businesses: [1]) and as a result you get extremely fluctuating stacks. Every piece of code written by others was never written with care [2] - that is the assumption at least because more often that not it's true. Everyone in their own right thinks that only their code works well and has some special properties but in the end you face the exact same problems: problems of design rather than implementation.

[0] http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-NoSilverBullet.pdf

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/E...: the business community, which, having been sold to the idea that computers would make life easier, is mentally unprepared to accept that they only solve the easier problems at the price of creating much harder ones

[2] See why Martin Fowler stresses Technical Excellence basically every time he get's on stage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_y2pNj0zZg

New products, languages are products as well, help sell conferences, consulting, books, trainings, libraries, IDEs....

Naturally it only works in new markets, because for existing products the market is already saturated.

Also some kind of improvements are just impossible in existing languages either due the language semantics and libraries, or community resistance.

Growth. Our industry grows by 30% per year, bringing huge groups of unexperienced developers, trying their best to be pragmatic.

Secondly, education is focussed on what’s new, not on what has been well engineered.

On the other hand I am impressed at how open industry has been to new languages since 2010. At the risk of dating myself slightly in the 2000 - 2006 era proposing a completely new language to solve a business problem was a much more radical idea. This was the era where you could get a lot of street cred and tech envy from hackers by just picking a non mainstream language (Examples - Viaweb using scheme, Naughty dog using lisp, Jane Street using Ocaml, ITA software using lisp). On an optimistic note I think there has never been a better time to ship new tech stacks, users are open to change and companies are fairly open to trying new ideas out.

Can you provide a linke to Google's paper? I'm really interested in it.

Only companies like Google can afford to rewrite everything every few years.

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