|
|
|
|
|
|
by smalltalkcoder
2290 days ago
|
|
|
Evangelization is "preaching"; it's essentially advertising or marketing. There's no one way to preach or advertise. One can take a number of different approaches. Presenting technical information is one way, the most common way. It's how most languages are promoted. But most languages never succeed with this approach. Most languages never gain much mind share. So the author has taken another approach, something that is seldom attempted. The programming competition is an original and clever idea. I'm not sure how one can "demonstrate the benefits" of a programming language. Most languages have been used successfully in software projects (e.g., Crystal, Elixir, F#, Haxe, Julia, Nim, etc.). Does trotting out these projects prove anything? |
|
|
But writing articles about a particular premise then barely discussing it or offering a solution, that's not it.
> The programming competition is an original and clever idea
It's not that original; competitions for languages, especially to develop particular solutions in a language, happen all the time. That's how plenty of lesser-used languages wind up with some of the 'batteries' that erstwhile appeared to be missing.
It's a clever idea, yes. However, mention of the competition is also barely a paragraph's worth of text's mention at the bottom of a blog post that, I re-emphasise, gives the impression of discussing programming language evangelisation but then almost immediately makes no interesting remarks on the topic other than "some programming languages are still obscure", immediately launches into a poorly-demonstrated list of reasons why Pharo is apparently so good, and then a sentence or two about a competition.
The competition isn't even really discussed, how well it did, how many participants it drew, what came out of it. As it states, the success of the experiment is yet to be determined — which makes mention of it even more confusing.
We have a blog post with a broad, general scope that finishes with no real conclusion to its own thesis. This isn't advertising, this is spam.
> I'm not sure how one can "demonstrate the benefits" of a programming language
- Code examples (like GTK+ new website)
- Interactive widgets on websites (like ReasonML's website)
- Demonstrations of how a specific idea is better/more easily/more stably solved using that language (like most functional programming languages' websites)
- Interviews, often as blog posts or podcasts, with developers who've deployed applications or services backed by the language
There are plenty of ways that plenty of languages (and other technological artefacts, such as libraries and runtimes) can demonstrate their benefits, many more than I've listed.
Anything has to be better than saying "yes, it's better" without being able to reasonably demonstrate how or why to the satisfaction of people whose existing set of tools already ably work for them.
> Does trotting out these projects prove anything?
Yes, actually. It does. Most programming websites are falling over themselves to demonstrate that their languages are successfully used and deployed in all sorts of situations, some more domain-specific than others.
It proves that something not only is ready for the big time but also can do it something so much better than competing solutions — and, again, will demonstrate how or why.