How programmers transition between languages

[Joakim]

On Monday, 29 January 2018 at 11:48:07 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> I am less convinced by this argument. Go, Rust, and especially 
> Java have shown the power of tribalism and belonging to the one 
> true tribe eschewing all others. Java is a superb example of 
> this: the JVM is now a polyglot platform, and yet Java 
> programmers, especially enterprise ones, will only contemplate 
> using Java and refuse to be educated about Kotlin, Ceylon, 
> Groovy, JRuby, etc. However when a feature inspired (many years 
> later) by the innovations in other JVM-based languages gets 
> shoehorned into Java then, eventually, the Java folk are 
> prepared, reluctantly, to learn about it. And maybe a few years 
> later actually use it.

I thought this was a killer anecdote about maybe the first 
programming language war... over assembly language:

"Margaret Hamilton, a celebrated software engineer on the Apollo 
missions—in fact the coiner of the phrase 'software 
engineering'—told me that during her first year at the Draper lab 
at MIT, in 1964, she remembers a meeting where one faction was 
fighting the other about transitioning away from 'some very low 
machine language,' as close to ones and zeros as you could get, 
to 'assembly language.' 'The people at the lowest level were 
fighting to keep it. And the arguments were so similar: ‘Well how 
do we know assembly language is going to do it right?’'

'Guys on one side, their faces got red, and they started 
screaming,' she said. She said she was 'amazed how emotional they 
got.'

Emmanuel Ledinot, of Dassault Aviation, pointed out that when 
assembly language was itself phased out in favor of the 
programming languages still popular today, like C, it was the 
assembly programmers who were skeptical this time."
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/saving-the-world-from-code/540393/

Good to see things haven't changed in a half-century. ;) Not that 
I'm saying assembly was the obvious choice: maybe their 
assemblers were buggy or slow or whatever, it all depends on the 
details.