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Comment by seldo | Hacker News Reader

To repeat my own comment from a few week back ( https://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=rYqgO4wMtljd4zBdfWM3wt ): because enormous numbers of programmers already know JavaScript, and familiarity trumps + libraries being available trumps every other consideration when choosing a programming language, according to actual research ( http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~lmeyerov/projects/socioplt/pap... ).

This is why the presentation keeps talking about web developers. There are more web developers than there are any other kind of programmer. If you want to make your programming platform accessible, make it accessible to web developers.

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Is it really this hard for devs to learn proper languages for whatever they're doing? I almost think knowing multiple languages and having the ability to learn new ones quickly is what it means to be a programmer/developer, etc...

I'd be more interested in what embedded JavaScript would allow to be done that other existing tools can't currently do. After all, if you're a JavaScript person and you needed to do something on a device or platform, you wouldn't wait for a language runtime to become available, you'd just go learn the existing language/tools and build it?

Is it really this hard for devs to learn proper languages for whatever they're doing?

It's not hard.

But given a choice between Platform A which says "write in a language that all of you already know", and Platform B which says "write in this language most of you don't already know and would have to put in time and effort to learn before you could do anything useful with this platform"... which one would you bet on?

Not sure what sort of crack everyone else is smoking, but I generally base my decisions on how painless it is to develop for a new platform rather than one I already know. Other than that, if I don't know the language, but the environment really kicks ass, I'm going to learn the damn language.

Unless I'm really rushed and have 2 days to do a vast amount of work.

Well how could you possibly know for a platform that you have no experience with?

>There are more web developers than there are any other kind of programmer

Is there any data to back this up? I would think Java or VB or C++ programmers far outnumber web developers.

there are more rockstar web developers influencing VCs than any other kind.

ftfy.

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