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Comment by twp | Hacker News Reader

The central claim of the post is that Microsoft and Apple look after their developers while Facebook and Google will not. This is demonstrably false.

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.

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The analogy was to C# and Objective C, not to those other languages. The argument went

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.

Exactly and every time they lost some of their developer's support. The point is that Facebook could kill HVVM and Hack tomorrow and wouldn't get developer anger, because it's not their product.

With the first version of VB.Net and Winforms, you could more or less pretend that you were working in VB6; it was akin to the difference between C++ and C (with all the goodness and badness suggested by the analogy). VBA is still supported in Office.

People are still making ridiculous amounts of money writing Silveight apps, and to the degree that MS abandonded it, that was because of “mobile”.

I agree. Just because a technology is productized in some way doesn't mean it's safe. To the contrary if the product flops then the company will probably abandon it. Ideally I'd like to see both safeguards that a company will continue support: first, that they use it heavily internally; second, that it is productized and a substantial source of revenue or business security for the developing company.

You cannot disprove the claim "Companies are less likely to abandon programming languages if they are likely to suffer by doing so" by giving counterexamples.

MS and Apple case are even worse. MS solutions usually dont work outside Windows (yeah i know about Mono ,but it's just broken for me), and Obj-C,outside Ios and OsX, it has 0 utiliy.

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.

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