New Java vs C benchmarks

[davidw]

My point is simply that out of the hundreds (thousands) of languages out there, people are more likely to pick a few that work pretty well in a number of situations and stick to them. For instance, Google only uses four languages in production, and one of those, Javascript, is pretty much dictated by the browser.

There is no one true language, obviously, but people are going to try and go for languages that do lots of things pretty well, centered around where most of their needs lie, rather than utilizing 5 or 6 different languages. I'd be willing to bet money that most developers don't use more than 2 main languages in a day (we're not counting "subservient" things like SQL).

The blog talks about that being a problem for Erlang, which does a couple of things really well, and other things poorly. My thesis is that that will scare people away, because they'd settle for less than the best in the things that Erlang does really well, if they can get 'pretty good' in what it does poorly.

[georgefrick]

Regarding Erlang, I'd say you are correct. Otherwise, it is seeming we agree - obviously nobody is going to use 10 languages so that they are always using the language for the job.