It appears that many people seem to have too much of their life wrapped up in a particular programming language. You only need to look over at dZone, Reddit or Digg to see this fandom in all its glory. All too often we find articles about why such and such a programming language sucks. However, just because a language sucks for one (or a couple) of particular reasons, it doesn’t mean it is not useful in general. It’s like me saying computers suck because they crash. However, just because my computer crashes from time to time doesn’t mean it’s not useful.
I just find the whole religious aspect to a language rather pathetic. The result often leads to the inappropriate choice of language for development of an application, simply because the individual’s voice that is heard the loudest makes the decision. Ok, if any language will do then just go with whatever you are comfortable with, but stop yourself bitching about other people’s choice of language.
For example, the number of times you hear people saying dynamic languages are no use, for a plethora of reasons, is stunning. You would think that no one had ever developed anything of reasonable size and scale in these languages. It’s not as if most of the largest websites on this planet have not been written in PHP/Python/Ruby, yet you still read articles where people are saying where such a feat is likely to lead to catastrophe. Stop doing this it makes you look stupid.
The same can be said for those that diss Java. OK, I think it’s possibly a poor choice for those considering a startup web business (basically if you are going to be considering shared hosting Java as an option on this platform is nonexistent), but there are many places where the use of existing libraries written in Java make it the ideal choice for an application. An example of this can be seen in what I’m currently working on, which is an application that uses constraint programming techniques. There are a few such libraries in other languages but the most mature and feature rich (and free) are in Java so sense dictates you use Java.
Essentially my bug bear boils down to people choosing a language for the wrong reasons, more often than not due to blind faith rather than education. Don’t just use a language because it is popular, use it because it best fits the job needing done. Popularity can come into it though, because at the end of the day you might wish to tap into a large set of existing programmers, or you may want to attract the brightest young talent who want to work in what’s popular/new. Just don’t let it be the only thing that dictates your choice.
Unfortunately, regardless of however many blog post or articles people read and write, I feel that we are never going to remove this inherent language evangelism. Maybe the industry would be in a far better position if we were all language agnostic. Can you imagine how much more work would get done if people spent the first two months of a project actually doing work rather than arguing about what language it should all be written in.