AstonJ

AstonJ

How can smaller, more independent languages compete with those backed by tech giants?

  • Do you think it’s worth worrying about?
  • Do you think it’s going to be an even bigger issue in future?
  • If so what can the teams of smaller more independent languages (and frameworks) do to compete?

I have some ideas that doesn’t involve deep pockets - but curious to hear what you think :upside_down_face:

Most Liked

dimitarvp

dimitarvp

Not at all. Most languages out there are not backed by corporations and they are doing amazingly well.

  • OCaml is mostly used and extended by Jane Street but it is still being actively changed by scientists and hobbyists.
  • Rust is backed by a foundation but started off as a bunch of hobbyists.
    Elixir is still not backed by a corporation and it enjoys a steady slow growth to this day.
  • F# wasn’t corporate-backed at the beginning as well.
  • Zig is mostly the brain-child of a single person and is highly praised.

Examples abound. If anything, I’d claim the opposite: the more corporately backed a language is, the more it gets warped to the needs of the corporations that back it and that’s not a good thing.

One example: Golang is backed up by Google and it suffers a number of embarrassing incidents like elementary mistakes in its crypto and HTTP libraries.

Nobody can predict the future but if programming becomes strongly regulated down the line then yes, lack of corporate backing might be fatal. At the moment this isn’t a problem at all though.

Awesome and amazing tooling. Elixir, Rust and Zig are a shining example. It’s not enough your language to be really good (LISP, OCaml) but it also has to have very good package manager, task runner etc. (cargo for Rust, mix for Elixir). Python is hugely popular yet it suffers from basic lack of tooling to this day.

If you make your programming users’ lives easier then will flock to your language.

Nothing in particular except for something rather vague from me:

Watching Rust and OCaml showed me that some scientific (mostly mathematical and logical) training pays huge dividends. Some Rust core functions and 3rd party libraries utilized particular breed of state machines (finite state automatons I think) to optimize regexes and concurrent / parallel processing with crushing success. And others are starting to sit on top of those extremely solid foundations.

Just an opinion: a bit more formal training and higher education need to make a comeback to the professional programming. Otherwise everybody is reinventing the same half-broken wheel all the time.

finner

finner

hi @dimitarvp -

that sounds worrying. What would be regulated? I’m thinking encryption … ?

Another interesting point!! As tech advances at the speed of light the industry might just need people to upgrade their formal qualifications every number of years. The Java community is only starting to shuffle out of its deep sleep for the past 10 years. New concepts need to be learned now like - Functional Programming, Reactive Streams, Java modules, and more.
I have often heard programmers being compared to doctors. Doctors are also constantly in a learning state, otherwise they would be treating patients with outdated techniques. Do you think programmers should have licenses ? … I just has a NullPointerException thrown in my brain when I wrote that,
What kind f formal training are you thinking about?

dimitarvp

dimitarvp

Real, true mathematics. Constraint solving. Probabilistic calculations and algorithms. Calculations of the limits of functions (property testing kind of does that but not really).

Parallel processing of complex graphs – just one strong innovation here can make most compilers on the planet 6x faster.

There are many examples.

I’m not a mathematician. But nowadays I wish I was. Math has a lot of stuff for us to learn from. Modern programming reinvents wheels and tears them apart on a regular basis.

I feel that we can do so much better.

Where Next?

Popular General Dev topics Top

Rainer
Have you seen the new features that will be available in the upcoming C# 9 release? C# is taking a lot of input from functional l...
New
AstonJ
Which apps do you think are killing it right now? Either from a technical perspective or ones that you like personally or feel have been...
New
AstonJ
Looking at @siddhant3030’s photo from the Do you blog? thread, do you cover your computer or phone camera as a security precaution? Wha...
New
siddhant3030
I’m thinking of buying a monitor that I can rotate to use as a vertical monitor? Also, I want to know if someone is using it for program...
New
AstonJ
Curious to know which languages and frameworks you’re all thinking about learning next :upside_down_face: Perhaps if there’s enough peop...
New
New
AstonJ
Things like smart speakers (such Amazon Alexa), smart TVs or other devices with built in microphones, cameras or with other features that...
New
TwistingTwists
Hello Fellow developers, I have been trying to wrap my head around How difficult would it have been to be a dev 20-30 years ago? I have...
New
AstonJ
00:00 The Year 2022 00:38 Web3 03:28 Metaverse 05:05 AI 06:22 Databases 07:31 JavaScript 09:58 Other Trends to Know WDYT - what wi...
New
AstonJ
Do we have any digital nomads here? Anyone fancy it? If so, which countries would you consider? I’ve been toying with the idea for a wh...
New

Other popular topics Top

New
Rainer
My first contact with Erlang was about 2 years ago when I used RabbitMQ, which is written in Erlang, for my job. This made me curious and...
New
AstonJ
In case anyone else is wondering why Ruby 3 doesn’t show when you do asdf list-all ruby :man_facepalming: do this first: asdf plugin-upd...
New
DevotionGeo
The V Programming Language Simple language for building maintainable programs V is already mentioned couple of times in the forum, but I...
New
Margaret
Hello everyone! This thread is to tell you about what authors from The Pragmatic Bookshelf are writing on Medium.
1147 28379 760
New
Maartz
Hi folks, I don’t know if I saw this here but, here’s a new programming language, called Roc Reminds me a bit of Elm and thus Haskell. ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Programming Ruby is the most complete book on Ruby, covering both the language itself and the standard library as well as commonly used t...
New
AstonJ
This is a very quick guide, you just need to: Download LM Studio: https://lmstudio.ai/ Click on search Type DeepSeek, then select the o...
New
RobertRichards
Hair Salon Games for Girls Fun Girls Hair Saloon game is mainly developed for kids. This game allows users to select virtual avatars to ...
New
Fl4m3Ph03n1x
Background Lately I am in a quest to find a good quality TTS ai generation tool to run locally in order to create audio for some videos I...
New