Technologies to Watch: A Look at Four That May Challenge Java's Development Dominance (O'ReillyNet)

Technologies to Watch: A Look at Four That May Challenge Java's Development Dominance (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Oct 21, 2005 15:42 UTC (Fri) by mdaniel (guest, #33232)
In reply to: Technologies to Watch: A Look at Four That May Challenge Java's Development Dominance (O'ReillyNet) by philips
Parent article: Technologies to Watch: A Look at Four That May Challenge Java's Development Dominance (O'ReillyNet)

But when you come to age, when you start feeling confident in harnessing all computing power available - sandboxes are out of game. They are restricting - and why you need restrictions when you know what to do? Perl, Ruby & Assemblers are all coming back. Preventing people from doing stupid things, will prevent people from doing smart things too. Do not forget that golden rule of Unix. Ever.

I honestly do understand and agree with most of your point(s). But even the very first chapter of "The Mythical Man Month" discusses the gap between the cavalier attitude you describe and the concept of software engineering. There is such a thing as productivity, even for garage start-ups, and the combination of language and programmer determines how well that pair will achieve their goals.

My second point, and this is stongly tied to the first, is about dealing with the harsh realities of Corporate America (or Corporate anywhere). In the vast majority of my experience, you have a bunch of inexperienced and unmotivated workers in whom your are entrusting your business goals. The odds of any one of the twelve monkeys you hired from the University of Party being able to wield the light saber of assembler or even C [but I repeat myself] are very low. Even Perl6 is showing how much people just really don't like malloc/free when you have a more fastidious computer to handle the housekeeping for you. IIRC, moving away from "systems" programming was one of the goals COBOL was trying to achieve.

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