Steve Yegge is my Hero of the Month
2008-02-12 15:46:11
He has some great stuff in his most recent essay:
So you can write Java code that's object-oriented but C-like using arrays, vectors, linked lists, hashtables, and a minimal sprinkling of classes. Or you can spend years creating mountains of class hierarchies and volumes of UML in a heroic effort to tell people stories about all the great code you're going to write someday. Perl, Python and Ruby fail to attract many Java and C++ programmers because, well, they force you to get stuff done. It's not very easy to drag your heels and dicker with class modeling in dynamic languages, although I suppose some people still manage. By and large these languages (like C) force you to face the computation head-on. That makes them really unpopular with metadata-addicted n00bs. It's funny, but I used to get really pissed off at Larry Wall for calling Java programmers "babies". It turns out the situation is a little more complicated than that... but only a little. And Haskell, OCaml and their ilk are part of a 45-year-old static-typing movement within academia to try to force people to model everything. Programmers hate that. These languages will never, ever enjoy any substantial commercial success, for the exact same reason the Semantic Web is a failure. You can't force people to provide metadata for everything they do. They'll hate you.