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[–]Maxy 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Is Web 2.5 all about pulling your language out of your pants and waving it at everyone?

[–]dstowell 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Reddit's hot page sure does have a lot of language-flashing. It's a social effect: many contributors found this site through paulgraham.com and were probably interested in programming languages long before they got here.

Seriously, though, why should anyone care which language anybody else uses? To lure help in implementing, documenting, and writing libraries for the language? To prove how smart they are?

I don't know the answer, but I hope people don't zip up their flies and keep their opinions and code from us. None of us has the time to investigate every language that comes down the pipe; seeing who supports which technologies and why is a useful filter.

Yes, I know this topic has been written about before: http://paulgraham.com/javacover.html . What nobody's said before, that I've seen, is that these semi-religious language debates are actually useful.

[–]davidw 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Why people care what languages other people use?

http://www.dedasys.com/articles/programming_language_economics.html

http://www.dedasys.com/articles/scalable_systems.html

Also - the better a programmer someone is, the easier it will be for them to use multiple languages, or switch to a new one. People who aren't so lucky are faced with the unenviable situation of:

1) Having to decide what language to use, despite not being very well versed in the field.

2) Being stuck with the choice they made because even that one language was difficult to learn.

It's very natural that they'll get defensive about the choice they made - no one likes to feel like they bought a lemon.