Comment by nologic01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nologic01 | Hacker News Reader

He is obviously right about the stagnation but he does not seem to be connecting the dots (at least in this video) about why this is so - which in turn might inform us as to when to except some change.

Languages and their tooling ecosystems express how computing is concretely embedded and used by society. People adopt the tools to get jobs and to get the job done, whatever the "job" is. In turn the available remunerative jobs fit certain business models and markets.

The ecological landscape that prevails today is largely monocultures centered around the distortion fields of a few oligopoly entities. But not exlcusively so. You still have all sort of remnants of previous era landscape, the enterprise world stuck in its java coffin, the quirky projects of the Web 1.0 era still trusting php etc.

Massive adoption of a fresh and "clean" new thing will only happen with the emergence of a new economic reality, expressed for example through new actors. New tools that make desirable new things possible may enable such an evolution and eventually may be synomymous with it but these things don't happen made to order.

> quirky projects of the Web 1.0 era still trusting php

Disagree with the dig at PHP. PhpStorm+Psalm doesn't give you perfection, but a perfectly respectable development environment. Using PHP isn't anachronistic, these shallow dismissals are. If anyone out there hasn't seen PHP 8 and Psalm yet, it's worth a look. All languages and ecosystems have trade offs, PHP is no exception, it is a good fit for many scenarios.

Sorry, I didn't mean to sound dismissive (much less shallow!) about php. In fact I have great admiration for projects from wikipedia, to wordpress, moodle, matomo, you name it, before even talking about the modern php landscape you mention. In my book what you achieve is far more important than how you achieve it.

Crockford is arguing about "clean starts" and that is fine but the thrust of my comment that this will be driven by business models, not so much by tools. Sometimes tools are enablers of new things, so there is a chicken-and-egg aspect to it.

So we have all these ecosystems that were once flourishing but are now in a stationary state because the business models are in stationary state. There is a variety of tools that are good enough to get the current "job" done, but its not clear what will bring us to the next phase...

While I applaud the recent-ish improvements to PHP, the biggest issue is still unresolved: the standard library is a mess. It is inconsistent as a rule -- in terms of function naming, argument order, error behaviors, etc.

I think this issue is probably intractable unless PHP wants to go the Python route and have a hard fork.

I say this as someone who hasn't professionally used PHP in about a decade, but still has a few open source projects: the arguments against PHP are silly at best, especially this particular argument. With modern IDEs it's easy to work around these quirks in the language.

OK, but are there any good arguments for PHP? Why not use something less quirky instead?

Modern Java with its modern IDEs used with good coding patterns is a completely fine environment as well

I think he meant more in the sense of projects that weren't adapted to modern coding standards

Adoption of new languages stalled out with the proliferation of installed base attached to a language. Specifically, if you are deploying anything consumer facing, it makes little sense to consider anything other than javascript for web. If you have more of a budget, you will target whatever iOS supports nowadays. Even more budget, whatever the current Android stack is.

There is some nuance, of course. But, at large, those are your options.

Similarly, if you are writing a game, whatever dev kit your target of choice supports. With a heavy bias to the asset pipeline.

So called "backend" programming is, perhaps, different. That said, you are almost certainly best to pick whatever is close to "native" where you are deploying.

"Languages and their tooling ecosystems express how computing is concretely embedded and used by society. People adopt the tools to get jobs and to get the job done, whatever the "job" is. In turn the available remunerative jobs fit certain business models and markets."

This seems like the key thing. We've gone through something similar with operating systems where there hasn't been a ton of change for a very long time now. It seems like we've just hit the same part of the lifecycle with programming languages where change happens much more slowly.

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