Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by denton-scratch 1021 days ago
> I was left with an expertise and knowledge of a language that was now, effectively useless.

VB did that to me; the lesson I learned is to avoid[0] languages with just a single implementation. As a consequence, I'm not very interested in languages like Ruby, Go and Rust. In the old days, every language had a train of compilers/interpreters following it. Pascal, COBOL, FORTRAN, even ALGOL. I believe that in those days, building a compiler for an existing language was a pretty standard hobby project. Everyone and his dog had built one, and manufacturers bundled their own ones with the hardware.

[0] Learning is hard; I jumped from VB to PHP.
2 comments
tremon 1020 days ago
Ruby has multiple implementations: https://github.com/planetruby/awesome-rubies

The main implementations are:

  - MRI (aka CRuby, the reference implementation)
  - mruby (lightweight embedded engine)
  - JRuby (on top of the JVM)
  - IronRuby (on top of the .Net stack)
link
em-bee 1020 days ago
not sure why you are making that distinction. sure, a few decades ago, a single implementation meant that a language was not widely used. but that is no longer true today. the biggest example for a widely used single implementation language is probably java.

and learning ruby, go or rust surely is not useless

link
TristanBall 1020 days ago
The point, I think, is not how widely used it is, the point is that you become beholden to a single, often corporate vendor.

I'm not actually sure what made the transition from VB classic to the DotNET version so disruptive, and so damaging to VB in terms of popularity and mindshare ( possibly that C# was better while still sharing enough of the benefits? )

But from everything I saw it was. VB mindshare just fell off a cliff from everything I could see.

I mean, you could say similar things about the damage and disruption about perl->raku and python 2->3, which are both effectively single implementation ( ok, less true of python ), but the end result seems very different.

Perl5 is still nearly standard in linux/unix, especially anything not embedded or real-time, while raku is niche, although perl5 is more and more niche despite that, with many, many haters..

Python 3 is probably as popular or more so than 2 was

VB is an also ran in DotNET languages.

So, I dunno, I think there might be more to it that just "single implementation is risky". "Single corporate owner" might be a better one, idk?

link
em-bee 1020 days ago
ha yes, single corporate owner is certainly a different kind of issue. i agree with that.
link