Bambi Meets Godzilla, the death of Smalltalk, and programmers and their languages
One of my tag searches (Jim, tagging really is good) turned up an interesting post out on the O'Reilly Ruby blogs. Bambi Meets Godzilla - O'Reilly Ruby:
It seems to me that there are two major contributors to language flamewars.
The first is that most programmers don't like to learn new languages. I don't know why, but true polyglots like me seem to be comparatively rare, maybe 5%-10% of the programmer population. Most folks apparently prefer to master one language and stick with it for life.
The second is economics. Money motivates most decisions in the end. Companies need to make money, programmers need to get paid. You know all the old sayings: time is money, business is war, money (or love) makes the world go 'round, all's fair in love and war.
Programmers fall in love with their languages, so you've got two of the biggest forces in the world at play here: love and money, mixed with either fear or laziness. Is it any wonder people fight over languages?
The whole essay is a good read and I've added Steve to my feeds. I don't get to do any Ruby work, but it looks interesting. Language discussions always seem to become flamewars, and Steve's analysis of why, and why these wars are so stupid, is well done. Sure I prefer Smalltalk, whether he thinks it's dead or not, but like Steve I can work in multiple languages and I don't think learning a new language is any big deal.
His comments about the Ruby community are in line with my own experience, it's a very friendly and outward looking group.
Tags: culture, programming, Ruby
