Hacker News Reader

"There are 2 hard problems in computer science: caching, naming, and off-by-1 errors."

Is there a better name for "programming language" that avoids the problem of association with natural language?

I would say "platform" in these discussions since that's what we're actually comparing in practice when we're arguing about what technologies to use for business. By 2006, it was obvious that Java-the-language was deficient in comparison to alternatives like Python and Ocaml, but people (and here I include smart people who understand technology) continued to prefer it because it had the best libraries.

Paul Graham argued that language fundamentals matter more than libraries and tooling. This was true in his case (Viaweb) but it's not true in general and for long-term adoption trends, which are dominated by small, part-time projects (innovators and early adopters) for which having to write a bunch of libraries (CSV parsers, for example) that already exist in Java would be a killer.

Java won the late '90s and 2000s because of the platform, not the language. The language sucks, and even by the standards of 2005 (when Scala was immature and Clojure didn't exist) it sucked, but it had the best tooling and therefore won.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com