The Language Wars

I just stumbled upon your site, and really enjoy reading your work. I am fairly new as far as programming as a career (I graduated about a year ago). I completely agree with you about choosing a language to fit the needs of a project and not picking it just because.

Although to me it is somewhat difficult to compare languages. Where do you start? I am sure it is due to my inexperience in the field, but how would you do it? I would be interested to read a blog about how to choose the language that best suits the project at hand.

Thanks again for your blog!

Jacob -

The best advice I know of for that is simply to learn lots of languages. Ideally, lots of different languages, with different characteristics. (The way I've found useful for doing that is to read enough about the language to get a sense of what it's good for, pick a project that seems like a good fit, and write it with lots of looking at the man page while you do it.)

This also has other advantages, in expanding the ways that you think about how programs are structured. For a simple example, back when I was writing programs in Fortran 77 (which is the version of Fortran that actually deserves the bad reputation; later versions are vastly better), I remember writing a nice simple recursive routine for a key cornerstone of a program. Thing is, Fortran 77 doesn't actually support recursion, so I had to manually create a variable stack and so forth -- but, because I knew what recursion was and how it worked from writing programs in languages that did support it, it was pretty simple to map that into something that worked in Fortran 77. There are many, many other things like that, and the more you learn, the more you can do.

I love this post. It's so very true and something I've have already aligned my outlook with when it comes to programming. The more the merrier!

Jacob: I had an experience just yours when trying to come up with a good solution to formalizing the use of assertions in a language that didn't offer them. The point being, the more well-traveled a programmer you are, the more expressive and creative you can be in other environments where someone with less experience might be a bit more stifled.

Joel Spolsky also wrote to this end I think. I wish more people had this point of view, but honestly it really just comes down to how passionate people are when it comes to their craft. If a single programmer just really doesn't care that much about what they're doing, you can't expect them to just jump outside of their relative zone of comfort to find new learning experiences.

But if you find/meet those people, hold onto them in whatever capacity you can!

I'm not a fan of language wars, but one thing I dislike from those who spite language wars like myself is when they adamantly claim that a good developer with sound engineering principles can transition to any language quickly and write good code.

I don't disagree 100%, but these types tend to reduce similar languages (ex: all object-oriented languages) down to a lowest common denominator and their code ends up ignoring a lot of the rich features of the specific language, like when a C++ programmer ignores the power of coroutines in C#, or when a Java programmer ignores the power and simplicity of static polymorphism in C++ and the whole idea of separating algorithms from data structures, or when a C++ programmer ignores the power of introspection in Java.

That's not to say that sound engineering principles are not important, they are most important, but languages need to be taken individually and one needs to spent a great deal of time mastering that specific language.

I find this type of thinking particularly prominent in the object-oriented realm, especially by those who think that reading about design patterns will make them a good developer in any language that supports object-oriented programming.

This is Joel Spolksy's post on language wars - interesting that he says choice of language isn't that important, and that if your head architect wants to use a certain language, then you probably should use it. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html

Very nice article. Thanks fro this!

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