The thing this (very good) post doesn't mention is that big companies select for blub languages because that's where the most low-cost labor is, in that you can hire multiple Java developers for the cost of one Haskell developer, even if Haskell might be objectively a better choice for the project.
I don't think this is a charitable interpretation. As a business, you need to be able to backfill positions or hire more when the need arises. If you use a language that's very commonly used, it's a lot easier to hire. There isn't anything sinister to that, it's simply reasonable.
There was a post, I think on the Uber engineering blog, that stuck with me. It essentially boiled down to: it's easier to change the tech stack than the hiring pool, and talked about deliberately setting something up that was technically less optimal but easier to hire for
Corollary: it's perhaps easier to throw money at fancier hardware to improve performance, than the alternatives
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I did not expect to see big-company apologia on Hacker News.
In the comments I see little apologia. The article rather brings up some points which are contrarian to the common view on HN, and the people on HN discuss whether these points have some truth in them, or the author missed some important considerations, or whether the author is wrong.
> Wikipedia is literally a spin-off of a porn company.
Thinking this is relevant is a very revealing position. It shines some very strong light on your ideological biases and, yes, your agenda, which I feel certain you will feel obligated to deny as a defensive measure. You are showing your hand in ways I don't think you realize.
It gave me an idea, a tool to analyze history of Hackernews user comments and determine what they are up to, what ideas they are pushing, etc. Would be cool and horrible at the same time (so if anyone wants to be on the first page of HN and has a couple of LLM credits somewhere)
A "corporation" is any time two or three people gather together in something's name. It's any kind of, well, corporate entity, a single thing comprised of multiple people. A school is a corporation, a town is a corporation (seriously, many municipalities are legally incorporated), a marriage is a very limited corporation, and a business is also a corporation. So, yes, Wikipedia is a corporation, and it should be proud of the fact it can keep so many people working towards a common goal.
There's no such thing as coercive licensing, and thinking there is is buying into the myths proprietary vendors perpetuate because they're tired of not being able to farm labor from Open Source developers. It's very interesting that the "viral" nonsense came from Microsoft, isn't it?
That's why you should bank with private counterparties, not the government.
If you buy eg a gold ETF, you can ask all these questions without any guns coming out. You can also go and exchange them for physical gold whenever you feel like it. Without any guns coming out.
If they break their promises, you can sue them. Without any guns coming out.
The problem with Go is that it's single-source. That used to be death, single-source; couldn't get contracts if you were the only one providing a technology. C is multiple-source; even if you limit yourself to modern OSS compilers there's GCC and Clang, each from an independent group.
The trend towards unstandardized languages that only exist as a single blessed implementation, as opposed to languages defined by an official standards document with multiple implementations that are all on the same footing, is definitely an artifact of the Internet era: You don't "need" a standard if everyone can get an implementation from the same development team, for some definition of "need" I suppose.
If your horizon is only 20 years, Go is likely reasonable. Google will probably still exist and not be an Oracle subsidiary or anything similarly nasty in that period. OTOH, you might have said the same thing about staid, stable old AT&T in 1981...
> C++ is one of the properties that SCO owns today and we frequently are approached by customers who wish to license C++ from us and we do charge for that. Those arrangements are done on a case-by-case basis with each customer and are not disclosed publicly. C++ licensing is currently part of SCO's SCOsource licensing program.
Maybe they claimed to own an implementation of C++ but it would be typical of them to claim to own the moon and sun and be sublicensing the stars to God.)
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