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by willtim 2377 days ago
> I'd be extremely surprised if you could show that any feature or lack thereof actually costs you money,

Bad language design and semantics definitely costs money in the long term. For example, Tony Hoare refers to Null References as his "billion dollar" mistake. The verbosity of Java before sophisticated IDEs would also have cost significant time and money. Java is improving significantly (and arguably was never as bad as say JavaScript or PHP), but there are some legacy decisions that will be very hard to change; and so improvement can only ever be incremental.
1 comments
pron 2377 days ago
> and so improvement can only ever be small and incremental.

You seem to hint that some hypothetical non-small improvement can be made differently (in some other language). Perhaps it could, but it doesn't seem anyone has done it yet. We do not observe large differences between and in companies based on language choice. I think some of the reason is that developers overestimate the cost of coding in the entire software development process.

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willtim 2377 days ago
> We do not observe large differences between and in companies based on language choice.

Hmm, I think it's pretty clear that most folks are far more productive in Python than say C++. But yes, I agree that there's no silver bullet, programming is hard.

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pron 2377 days ago
Well, not at all in the domains where C++ is normally used nowadays; that's why I talked about comparing reasonable choices. On the other hand, you can see how quickly people transitioned away from C++ to more appropriate alternatives in those domains where C++ is no longer used. It happened virtually overnight (same as the transition from Assembly to Fortran and from Fortran to C). When you don't see such a rapid transition it's usually a good sign that none of the alternatives offers a big advantage.
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