How I decide between many programming languages

drewdevault.com

11 points·Bl4ckb0ne··5 comments

Have other prolific programmers made lists like this? I'd love to read something which gets into the real nitty gritty.

A willingness to code C but not C++ is just silliness. You can complain that the language is too big, but everything in it is there to solve serious engineering problems. Complaining about it just shows you are not serious about engineering.

It's OK not to be serious about engineering. Most people aren't, and don't want to be. The honest thing is to say so, instead of complaining about the language.

The bit on PHP is quite funny. Wish employers and managers knew this.

To paraphrase a comment that I read on Hacker News: "I don't care. If there comes another piece of shit language that makes me money, I'll use it"

It depends at what abstraction level of problem solving you work at. Some people work at the 'we need programmers to implement x feature on our system using y language' level, and that quote is appropriate. There are people that make a lot of money maintaining COBOL systems for banks, that we all benefit from.

Some work at the 'there is this problem, what do we build to solve it?' level (myself usually included). In that case you have more scope to choose the right tool for the job, and a lot of the time the tradeoff is not favourable for PHP past the first week.

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