Owning a Programming Language
marco.org
marco.org
The post says:
> Microsoft and Apple have massive vested interests in supporting their languages and platforms. They stand to lose a lot to their core businesses if they stop. Developers’ interests align somewhat with theirs in this regard: one developer doesn’t have a lot of power in those relationships, but the sum of all developers definitely does, so these companies generally need to care for these languages and maintain these platforms for a long time.
This reasoning fails dismally when applied to Microsoft's own technologies: VB6, Silverlight, Windows 8 Phone (original version). All these developers cast out. There are surely more examples.
1. Facebook might abandon Hack at some point
2. No, Hack is like Objective C and C#, which Microsoft and Apple support just fine
3. No here is how Hack is NOT like those languages, community support is not important to facebook like it is for ObjC and C#.
So how Microsoft treats other languages is completely irrelevant to that particular point, and actually supports what Marco is arguing here, since you're implying that programming languages might be abandoned even if community support does matter.
People are still making ridiculous amounts of money writing Silveight apps, and to the degree that MS abandonded it, that was because of “mobile”.
Hack IS open source. Cocoa or .Net are not. Frankly Hack doesnt come out of nothing. There is a serious need or demand in PHP fixing ,since half PHP core team dont want to fix anything.I'm glad facebook did this ,somebody picked up PHP and made it better,without giving a damn about what PHP core thinks. That's a good start,there are good things in PHP ,but there are bad things too that should just vanish.Too bad i'm not good enough to create my own language, I so would want to do that.
It's public knowledge -- yet many people don't know -- that Google is also using AngularDart for large internal projects. Though the technologies still have relatively small user bases, Google has devoted considerable time, money and manpower to building software with AngularDart and to making it accessible to external developers. For example, my talk was part of an initiative called FlightSchool that provides comprehensive tutorials, workshops and other resources.
Having said that, I wouldn't argue that a large user base is the most important signal of mutual support and leverage in the relationship between engineers and software companies.
Is that true? I spent the last four years coding primarily in Objective-C for Linux and Win targets; none of the tools I used were from Apple.
I am not sure if can agree with the Google Dart comment. Google has a vested interest in making it as easy as possible for content creators making stuff for the web. From some Dart development I have done, the whole ecosystem looks good to me.
It's so obvious I wonder what goes on in the op's head.
"They get almost no benefit from anyone else using them"
"Except finding bugs and occasionally submitting patches, but Facebook is so massive with such a large codebase that they’re likely to find most bugs relevant to them long before anyone else does".
Facebook's bug bounty proves this to be untrue.
Contrast this with Microsoft and C#. Microsoft would suffer if they abandoned C#. They would lose a huge swath of developer mind share. They would rattle confidence of the remaining developers. There would be huge costs to their clients who would be forced to switch to a new (possibly not-Microsoft) technology.
I have no idea where this originates from and it hurts me to see that his void content gets picked over actual quality content just because it's "the Marco". His domain should be - wildcard at the begin and end - permanently banned from Hacker News because it only drags us into a wasted spot on the frontpage.