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Discussion on: Is software developer fatigue a thing?

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cathodion profile image
Dustin King • Edited

That's why we should all use my favorite language for everything. *ducks*

Serious answer: I think the "problem" is that every language has its own model of the computational world, and every programmer does too. Also different people and languages value different parts of the software lifecycle, e.g. Python is supposedly optimized to be read, whereas Ruby I would argue is about writing in the most intuitive way. Java seems like it's meant to make the enterprise architect's job enjoyable.

But maybe we can all get what we want with more interoperability. Most languages have a C foreign function interface (which doesn't mean whatever library needs to be in C, it just means it needs to also support that FFI). Some have implementations for the JVM/CLR or JavaScript interpreters/compilers.

On the other hand, this might lead to everyone having to deal with codebases in five different languages. Not that hard actually, but occasionally annoying.

Over a longer term, I think there will be some language people realize is pretty good at doing everything and we'll end up standardizing on that. But then maybe some other language(s) will start eating its lunch and we'll be back where we started (but with better languages overall).

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

I don't know. I think we'll have software generating software by then and solve the problem at the root :D

All these languages are super fine but we talk A LOT about code reuse but then anytime there's a new language we have to reimplement all the building blocks from scratch.

Maybe the best approach is something akin to OTP, which is shared by all the languages around Erlang?

Why do we need to re-write standard libraries for each and every language? I know the answer but still, maybe one day we won't have to.

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cathodion profile image
Dustin King

I don't know. I think we'll have software generating software by then and solve the problem at the root :D

In other words we're the problem. 🤔

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

Not necessarily but we tend to "fork" instead of "merge" a lot.

We tell ourselves there are perfectly reasonable technical motivations for this or that new technology to be totally incompatible with the other one yet created to solve the same exact purpose :D