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Comment by noahlt | Hacker News Reader

An intellectual hackers' site like this one tends to be home to people playing with Scala, Erlang, Haskell, etc. Hacker News in particular was started by Paul Graham, so its seed community had a significant number of Lisp adherents. The startup community in general is biased towards dynamic languages, in particular, Ruby.

All this makes me think that Hacker News readers will tend to be on the leading edge of language popularity. But it is interesting to see the progress of mainstream adoption.

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An intellectual hackers' site like this one [..]

That article is not about HN, rather, it's a rehash of the recent TIOBE report, itself widely discredited.

Besides, HN readership is not that sophisticated, if at all. For straters, DDJ itself is a respected institution in computing (up there with USENIX) and is read-widely by actual programmers, software engineers, and scientists.

I think you're on to something here, at least about the HN community being at the leading edge of what's cool.

Just anecdotal, but I saw that statement in the article of "python surged" and had a WTF moment. Just yesterday I was putzing around with python and Fuse to make a silly filesystem, and found myself thinking "man python should really stop being my go-to language, it's making me seem so old-fashoned". Lately I have had a lot of those thoughts about python. It's my trusty language, and probably my first true love, but this last project and the article was my "python jumped the shark" moment.

So, the question now is:

I have a crapload of useful tools in python, and I don't want to rewrite them in other languages - has anyone made serious progress into calling into one runtime from another? Kind of like the JVM or .Net worlds, but universal?

I still use python for my utility scripts. There isn't a "next thing" for the niche yet AFAIK, all the hot activity seems to be in web-application languages(eg. Clojure, Scala, HaXe, Fantom) which don't do a lot to get down-and-dirty on the backend.

Isn't server-side javascript the Next Big Thing for utility scripts? I still use python, because of the difficulties of getting new runtimes approved in $bigco, but I got the impression that's where things were going.

Python "jumped the shark" because more people have started adopting it?

That puts things in perspective, doesn't it? There are buzzworthy languages and there are languages the rest of the world uses to get things done.

Sometimes a language and its community are so focused around flexibility and power that I don't believe the language is meant for widestream adoption. Erlang is really, really cool, but php gets websites built.

PHP gets websites built. But what use do I have for it if I want to make software? you know, something other than pumping ascii over a socket descriptor?

The toolbelt of even the least experienced craftsman has more than a single tool.

Careful, that's a form of heresy around these parts.

Give me an example of something you can't do in PHP. The language is turing complete .. your statement makes no sense.

Given the needed supporting technology, you can write a filesystem driver in PHP. With FUSE, you can.

What we should be questioning is how pointless would such endeavor be.

Like kenjackson pointed out (and, oddly, this time I agree with him ;-)), your toolbox should not be restricted to PHP, however Turing-complete it may be.

I wonder if you could write FUSE in PHP...

You would need to extend PHP somehow and make the kernel and its data structures visible.

But I have no intention of even dedicating one minute to such thoughts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit

I think the issue is whether one would even want to attempt to develop certain types of software using languages and environments that were designed to be used in a specific way. PHP would certainly not be one's first choice for developing native Windows desktop applications, for example.

The kicker for me was discovering that Facebook's PHP shell (http://www.phpsh.org/) is in fact written in Python.

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