Newsflash: Evangelisers are useless (programming)
rzwitserloot posted in programming on April 5th, 2006
These days I have the distinct feeling that programming is on the brink of another major breakthrough. My still-favourite language, java, has seen its development accelerated greatly (i.e: java 1.6 is released about 15 months after a very major 1.5 release, that’s unheard of), lots of waves in the web development area, mostly courtesy of Ruby on Rails..
but the problem is, I’m not an independent observer. I read a lot more blogs and such about programming languages, so my feeling that there’s a lot more happening in the programming world is perhaps simply a side-effect of me reading more about them.
And that last bit seems to be, remarkably, what’s happening.
Check this out! (Please look at least at the top table first or the rest won’t make any sense)
its listings are derived from google. All this supposed hype, all the recent stories about how programming languages need raving lunatic evangelisers - even talks of the impending doom of java because some of the java mainstays (like Bruce Eckel) are turning away from the language, etc, etc seem to be highly overrated. With all this hype about python and ruby, python HASNT GROWN ONE IOTA over the last year. Amazed the heck out of me.
Then again, Objective C is somewhere waaaay down the line which seems odd, because apple.com’s documentation about this language is excellent. (ObjC is the main development language for NeXTSTEP/Mac OS X, kind of like C++ is the ‘homebase’ of Windows, and C the basis of the linux kernel and most associated tools).
While I am thus forced to put certain question marks beside this research, it certainly puts evangelism in perspective. It really isn’t that important. I’m still not sure, then, what exactly makes a language accepted. I’d suggest that, if merit is the decisive factor, foxpro should not be the most rapidly rising star, that makes no sense. Python should certainly be higher than perl, basic, and maybe even PHP. Maybe it’s just dumb luck and accidental happenstance. That sounds just as likely, really.
April 5th, 2006 at 9:31
That’s funny, it shows from the diagram right under the table, that a lot of people that used to program in Java, tried Python around feb ‘04, but have returned to Java now. That’s more or less what I have done (but not in feb I think..)
April 5th, 2006 at 23:39
Complete bull (or as you put it ‘happenstance’).
Read today that Guido is beginning work on Python 3000. So at least it will grow in that respect.
April 6th, 2006 at 0:10
Ah, ladies and gentlemen, exhibit A: The raving lunatic evangelist.
I haven’t talked about that, but here’s another angle in this discussion: Anytime some evangelist or other starts making patently ridiculous claims (i.e: A steve yegge describing ruby), I expect that a number of experienced programmers react like I do: Ignore it. Even IF the language in discussion is worth another look.
April 6th, 2006 at 0:33
@Oliver: Actually, no, the big changes in the graph then are the result of google cleaning up and reworking their databases around that time. These days it’s less likely to occur again, because they average out results from 3 different search engines instead.
The cleanup mostly invalidated old data, and in general there’s a lot more stale information around regarding java compared to python. Then again, python is just as old as java or so, I hear.