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Discussion on: World of Warcraft - Programmer's Edition

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thecodetrane profile image
Michael Cain

I use (new lang) for (explicit purpose) and it works great! Let me tell you about it.

  • an opinion I can get behind.

(mature lang) is dead! Use (new lang) for your new app. What does your app do? Doesn’t matter! You need to use (new lang)

  • an opinion that can go straight in the garbage
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nicerain profile image
Walker

The situation you posted about is something that I find to be quite a large problem in the development community. It's an issue where there is no 'wrong' answer.

When companies suggest a language for a new project, they look at a few different things, such as scalability, maintainability, and efficiency.

The industry in general loves moving to the next big thing very quickly. I have no doubt that you are an excellent Ruby developer. I remember, though, when Ruby was the language to learn (the one everyone was telling people to switch to for all new projects).

While Ruby is still excellent for developing with, maintainability can be difficult in the long-run for a company. Not because the language itself is 'dead' but because developers are moving to learn languages where they have the greatest chance of getting a job. Learning what is hot allows people to quickly move onto another project.

For very large companies, the reason they stick with PHP and SQL is maintainability. These are more time tested at this point.

Honestly, I wouldn't let a few comments about a language being dead or dying upset you. I've been hearing that C++ is a dead language for the past 10 years (Java was the future and then C#), but there are still a lot of performance-sensitive applications that are developed in it. If you have a language that you enjoy and can be successful with, make something amazing with it!

I feel the beauty of a developer career is that you can be self-taught in a new language and find a job in a relatively short amount of time compared to other careers. As long as you are willing to learn and experiment, you will always be able to find some form of employment.

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thecodetrane profile image
Michael Cain

I agree with everything you said. Where I get my Irish up is when people trash other tools simply because they are more mature. We don’t need that in our community. If you want to use elixir, rust, clojure, scala, haskell...whatever, do it. Don’t, however, go around talking shit to get attention. Just because Trump does it...lol