A proper language comparison...

[H. S. Teoh]

On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 03:18:03PM +0200, Chris wrote:
[...]
> I have learned to be wary of comparisons like that. Any language
> that is sponsored or owned by a big company always "outperforms"
> other languages, and at the end of the day they only want to bind
> you to their products, no matter how "open source" they are.

+1.

I'm skeptical of attempts to reduce everything down a single number or
three, that can serve as a basis for numerical (or hand-waving)
comparisons. As if programming languages were that simple that one could
place them neatly on what is effectively a scale of 1 to 10!


> You can basically proof whatever you want. Most of the discussions I
> have had don't revolve around whether the language is good or not,
> it's about what people have heard/read, "Who uses it?", "I've heard
> ..." "Someone said ..." I once told a guy about D. He said "Ah, D,
> old-fashioned!" and he showed me a link that said "C# has a more
> modern feature ... bla bla". How ... scientific!

I get that a lot from Java fanboys. They make bold-sounding statements
like "Java is the future!", "Java is the best!", "D sucks, nobody uses
it!", "Java will get you a job easily!". But I've yet to hear some
factual evidence to back up these claims. Well, maybe except the last
one -- it's true that given Java's popularity, it has a high chance of
landing you a job. But the point is, just because it will land you a job
doesn't necessarily make it a *good* language, it merely shows that it's
a *popular* one.  Popular doesn't imply good.


T

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