ReligiousWarsOfProgrammingLanguages

ThoughtStorms Wiki

Religious wars about which is the "best" or "most productive" language are actually pretty redundant.

Increasingly, what software development is about is less the individualistic genius of composing algorithms, and more understanding a huge existing context of libraries, frameworks, infrastructural services from the operating system and internet, pattern libraries etc. Possibly the skills needed to be succesful here aren't traditional hacker skills as talked about in GreatHackers.

More and more of the work moves out of the language into the context.

Arguably, Java is now a major success because it's range of libraries are unescapable. Java the language has problems, but Java the platform is very healthy. And the new breed of Java afficionado is better at navigating this platform. More accustomed to searching for and relying on components from the Java eco-system. More likely to be trained from scratch to start by identifying and applying patterns from the catalogue. And it seems tools like Eclipse are now the state-of-the-art for helping work in this domain. IDE's are possibly more important than ProgrammingLanguages for productivity.