Comment by pron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pron | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Experience proves otherwise, to the best of my knowledge.

It's very hard to say that it does in programming, at least. Even though we could easily come up with value metrics for programming languages, we don't really know what they are for any particular language. However, that, in itself tells us something. The software industry is an environment with strong selective pressures. That big difference in "quality" (i.e. some metric with a bottom-line impact) will go unnoticed is hard to believe. It doesn't make sense from a theoretical perspective -- adaptive traits should be detected in a selective environment, and it also doesn't fit with observed reality. We observe that technologies that truly provide an adaptive benefit are adopted at a pace commensurate with their relative adaptability; often practically overnight.

So we have reasons to believe that it is not true that "better" languages lose, at least not ones that have some measure of adoption at all.

> strong selective pressures

The opposite is true. Unlike in electronics, construction, shipbuilding, you can write a shitty software and patch the hell out of it after release most of the time with the few exceptions.

Hence the only thing that matters is how cheap and replaceable the developers are. Unlike pharma or architecture, where errors are always costly.

Java was successful because is was 1) pushed by big enterprise company, 2) familiar to people with C,C++,perl background and 3) overall easy to write at the expense of verbosity and bloated codebases (who cares if you could just hire too many of the cheap devs who would write as many classes as needed).

> The opposite is true. Unlike in electronics, construction, shipbuilding, you can write a shitty software and patch the hell out of it after release most of the time with the few exceptions.

What happens in software is what the market wants. You cannot claim that something is better if it is better at doing something that the industry doesn't want (and even that you can't show). It's like the Betamax vs. VHS: Betamax was better at some metric that few if anyone cared about, but VHS was better at what people actually cared about.

> Java was successful because

Java was (and is) successful because it was (and is) a very good product with good backing. At the time, other companies, like Microsoft, Borland, IBM and others that few now remember also heavily pushed other products, and they didn't do as well. I am not claiming that Java is the best possible programming environment, but it is pretty funny to claim that some specific platform/language is better with absolutely nothing to support that claim.

> What happens in software is what the market wants.

Sure thing, I'm just emphasizing that it's a more of a social-enterprise-management issue, than a software quality.

> Java was (and is) successful because it was (and is) a very good product with good backing.

Or just because it's Sun/Oracle/baked into android/symbian. Who knows? IMHO it's more of a "nobody was fired for using java" than "java is a good language". It's a language for managers, not for programmers.

> Microsoft, Borland, IBM

MS does pretty well with CLR, for another reason, though. There were no product at the moment which could compete with Java in terms of marketing, money, support etc.

Borland had nothing for serious enterprise, MS had C++ and VB only back then, regarding IBM I don't even know what you mean, Smalltalk?

> Or just because it's Sun/Oracle/baked into android/symbian.

Fact is, in the 25 years since its introduction virtually no one has built a platform with a similar combination of performance, productivity and observability. Java has very little competition in the "serious software" space, although platforms/languages like Node, Python and Go -- that suffer in some or all of the factors I mentioned -- get used in microservices, that are eating into "serious software".

> Borland had nothing for serious enterprise, MS had C++ and VB only back then, regarding IBM I don't even know what you mean, Smalltalk?

I meant Borland with Delphi (which was quite heavily used for a while, even after Java came out), MS with Visual C++, VB and Fox Pro, and IBM with Smalltalk.

I agree with what you write.

But I also believe the counterfactual that, had Sun/Oracle been based their language upon (core) ML rather than Java (with suitable pragmatic additions like code loading and been able to convince programmers to use it), then that language would be even more dominant and performant today. Many of Java's mistakes and detours would have been avoided from Day 1.

Can I prove this? No. But the fact that Java and essentially all other successful languages have gradually been adapting essentially all of ML (sans modules), is evidence. It means that language designers like G Bierman, A Hejlsberg, Odersky et al, too have gone Milner's way.

> then that language would be even more dominant and performant today

I think you should watch the first 20 minutes of this talk: https://youtu.be/Dq2WQuWVrgQ

Java's early designers realised (or believed) that the features with most bang-for-the buck weren't linguistic, but were: GC, dynamic linking, and performance with observability. Linguistic features, overall, were a detractor from those, because people were hesitant to use them, and so they missed out on the big benefits. Java decided to provide these most important features wrapped in a language that was non-threatening at the time; James Gosling called it "a wolf in sheep's clothing." In other words, a familiar language was a very central part of the strategy. You say you believe it would have worked with a non-familiar one, well, we can never know, but if it hadn't, then much none of the other, more important features would have mattered.

> But the fact that Java and essentially all other successful languages have gradually been adapting essentially all of ML (sans modules), is evidence

As I said in another comment, it's not that all successful languages are adopting ML's features but some, and those ones do it because they influence one another and they knowingly borrow from ML because they like it. In other words, the designers of some influential languages like ML. Is it a coincidence? I don't know, but I'm hesitant to say that it's evidence that ML was "right." I, too, personally like ML, but I wouldn't claim its design leads to better outcomes than others. Some successful language clearly do not adopt ML's features -- e.g. all the untyped ones and Go.

BTW, Java's objects are a different take on modules. If you've seen 1ML, that's almost an OO language.

I understand the network effect, I understand that most decisions on PL are not based on technical reasons. Most non-experts mostly worry about syntax, as per P Wadler:

   "The simplest thing to do is a significant 
   change to the semantics. People won't argue 
   the way they do about syntax."

ML had GC, it would have been easy to add dynamic linking, and X Leroy made Ocaml fast, with a tiny fraction of the resources that have been poured into the JVM. Admittedly, this was a major breakthrough that was unexpected. I reckon the main problem was getting OO to work properly with generics: type inference becomes a problem and you have to worry about co/contravariance.

A Hejlsberg certainly wasn't on the ML train in the past. For a start he didn't think generics are a good idea (he told me personaly). Typescript shows that he changed his mind! Go explicitly rejected generics at the start, but Go-2 is scheduled to get them.

Module systems are not such a big deal in my exerience, I don't think ML's was a full success.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com