[chridou]

I never understood why people are looking for things which are boring and I think it is mostly employers who do. They should look for something which is good and solves their problems. I don't know how something with the attribute boring is of interest here as other attributes for a technology/PL might be much more important...

Actually they mean something different with "boring": It is just a lack of courage for simply saying "We are most conservative, do not want to move forwards and are not willing to take any risk. Also we are scared of specialists and talent and want to stay mediocre. Actually working with us is boring."

[jahaja]

> we are scared of specialists and talent and want to stay mediocre

This arrogance is just so weird. A High-quality code base is easy to read and change. a.k.a simple. Redis is a good example of this. To have found the perfect abstraction, or perfect feature set fit, for a particular moment in time and feature set, may feel good but doesn't really matter.

[chridou]

> to have found the perfect abstraction, or ...

Didn't even know that I was writing about the perfect abstraction.

Mediocre environments are where you will not find much code of high quality even though every GoF pattern seems to have been applied. That simple code you mention requires professionals and talent. Looking for the perfect abstraction is what you find in mediocre environments.

Redis is actually a good example. It is a highly specialized tool. It might perfectly fit your needs but someone in your company might have defined mysql as boring and Redis to be not... So youl'll use mysql...

[dunefox]

This, plus it enables them to fire and replace developers without much difficulty because there's a great number of people who know these languages (see Java...).

[bborud]

You are actually arguing for mediocrity. If someone needs to protect their employment by making their work more obscure so they won't be replaced then they probably aren't a very good hire. Companies tend to want to retain highly competent talent - not mediocre people or incompetents.

[dunefox]

I'm definitely not arguing for mediocrity since I'm not arguing for obscure code. I'm saying that companies that have much turnover (which a lot of software companies have) won't choose a language that doesn't offer them a huge pool of programmers.

[bborud]

I think most shops that are run by people who have experience with software development will tend to choose languages that are fairly mainstream. Yes, the recruitment pool is bigger, but so is the entire ecosystem. Tooling, libraries, books, documentation, easy to find knowledge, long term committments etc.

There are few things that are more frustrating than working on something that so few people work on your search results when looking for solutions to problems come up nearly blank.

And despite what high thoughts we programmers have of ourselves: we spend an inordinate amount of time Googling things :-)

[bborud]

In order to have a meaningful discussion, let me expand on what I mean by "boring".

To me, a boring language is one that is easy to learn, easy to read and which encourages somewhat homogenous code - through coding style and common idioms. It has few surprises and few dark corners.

If a language still has major aspects that practitioners struggle with after 2-3 years, it isn't "boring". If you have to expect every codebase in the same language to have different coding standards, it isn't boring.

A boring language is one where what you've learnt on one project has a high probability of being usable in a completely different company or on a project that does something entirely different from what you've done before. It is a language that disappears because you spend more time talking about how to solve problems and less time talking about how to express those solutions in a language.

Now I can understand that some people like the excitement of exploring new languages. And you should. On average you should try to learn at least one new language each year. Even if it is on your own time if your employer is stingy.

However, asking your employer to let you use some language on a project because you find it "exciting" is a big ask. Projects tend to have deadlines, they have quality targets, many projects are built by teams, so entire teams have to be conversant in the language. What if you need to scale up with more developers? How easy is it to recruit programmers in a given language and at a given level of proficiency? How about maintenance after you have left the company or grown tired of whatever language you were once very excited about? And what happens when a language goes out of fashion but the company running the code still depends on it?

People with responsibilities are not scared of talent. Rather the opposite. They depend on talent.

They may, however, be somewhat scared of "specialists" (in the sense of programmers who will insist on niche languages or niche technologies) because if you pay someone to write code, you don't want to have to search for "specialists" to maintain it or limit the size of your recruiting pool. You have an investment to manage.

As for mediocrity: I think you would need to back that argument up with something. Do you really think the choice of language is what makes a programmer brilliant or mediocre? Then why doesn't reality agree with that view? If that were true then for every Donald Knuth, Fabrice Bellard, Jeff Dean and John Carmack there should be lots of even better programmers that do all their work in "exciting" languages. Where are they? They should be far easier to enumerate than the people who use "boring" languages?

If you think caring about the long term value of code is "boring": try to start your own company and bet your own money. If you are that convinced of how "exciting" languages lead to brilliance it shouldn't be a tough choice to make.

[chridou]

> In order to have a meaningful discussion, let me expand on what I mean by "boring".

This is the problem with how boring is used. According to Wiktionary it just means "unable to engage or hold the interest". So how can this be a criteria for using a technology? Why do you redefine the word and deviate from the common meaning? What is the reason behind this? Why is it necessary that your understanding of "boring" has to be explained? It is a simple word which had a defined meaning for hundreds of years probably.

But here is my take on it: This was simply an attempt made by clever people within the industry to redefine the word so that they do not have to explicitly say what they really mean. Just call things without having a proper definition "boring". What is not boring must then be exciting. If we define boring to be good (which is actually crazy since the word itself has a negative connotation) everything exciting must be bad. Simple black/white thinking. And now we can simply call things "boring" as we like and indirectly call everything else bad.

Also it totally makes no sense to call technologies "boring" or "exciting" and thereby categorizing them for suitability. "Boring" is highly subjective. Some find Go boring, other find it to be exciting. Some find VBA boring, others experience it to be exciting. This has nothing to do with how complex, simple, fancy, hyped or old a technology is.

> To me, a boring language is one that is easy to learn, easy to read and which encourages somewhat homogenous code - through coding style and common idioms. It has few surprises and few dark corners.

Why is that boring to you? To me a language where I could easily reach a common ground with my colleagues so that we can together focus on business problems would be a very exciting language.

> Now I can understand that some people like the excitement of exploring new languages. Excitement of exploring new languages does not mean that the explored language is exciting/boring (whatever that means)

>However, asking your employer to let you use some language on a project because you find it "exciting" is a big ask.

One should only ask the employer to be allowed to use a new language if there is some benefit or if it is an experiment which will clarify whether it will be beneficial. This has nothing to do with boring/exciting.

> They may, however, be somewhat scared of "specialists" (in the sense of programmers who will insist on niche languages or niche technologies) because if you pay someone to write code, you don't want to have to search for "specialists" to maintain it or limit the size of your recruiting pool. You have an investment to manage.

True. This is where the risk parts enters the stage. It is always like this. The specialist might put you ahead of your competitors at a high risk while the generalist will keep you with the average at a low risk.

> Do you really think the choice of language is what makes a programmer brilliant or mediocre? Where did I even say this? What does talent have to do with the programming language being used?

> Then why doesn't reality agree with that view? If that were true then for every Donald Knuth, Fabrice Bellard, Jeff Dean and John Carmack there should be lots of even better programmers that do all their work in "exciting" languages. Where are they? They should be far easier to enumerate than the people who use "boring" languages?

Uh, with what view? Definitely not mine. Who says that the programming languages those people use are boring? I think you can simply choose any language and you are likely able to find 4 people who are potentially better programmers than the four mentioned. Not because they are bad or mediocre but because of the sheer amount of programmers in the world. Those four are simply famous but we have no proof/numbers on how "good" they are compared to the rest of the world.

> If you think caring about the long term value of code is "boring": try to start your own company and bet your own money.

And again. I never said this. Which definition of "boring" are you using here?

Also that sentence is dangerous. Even if caring for long term value would be boring (for some it might be exciting!) the real motivation for this is to secure previous investments which is a perfectly valid reason. Whether the way of achieving is is boring or not is completely irrelevant. And even further: If I would find an exciting(for me, since excitement is subjective) way to secure or even grow my investments I should not do it because it has to be boring? Securing investments or caring for long term value has nothing to do with whether something is boring or not.

> If you are that convinced of how "exciting" languages lead to brilliance it shouldn't be a tough choice to make

And once again. I never said this. I just said "Also we are scared of specialists and talent and want to stay mediocre" which not even mentions programming languages/technologies. I was just referring to how the word "boring" is misused and what might be the true intention behind the usage.

So in a summary: Good or bad decisions in business have nothing to do whether something is boring or not. This should never drive business decisions. But it seems like the word "boring" does.

[bborud]

Now you are being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian.