Which programming language did you choose and why?

[PorkyThePaladin]

You tell me... I am just responding to people's comments to me...

 

[J1M]

There are always trade-offs in the real world. And yet many start-ups still go with languages like Python and Ruby to develop their brilliant platforms, and then, once those platforms are huge, they might in some cases switch to more higher performing languages, but of course by that point, the ones coding are route programmers. So brilliant founders -> Python/Ruby, code monkey -> Java/Go/Scala/C#, etc.

What makes you think that? Projection?

Facts? Almost every single cutting edge hi-tech company began in Python/Ruby, and in some cases stayed there.

Just because you're a code monkey in a typical failing startup run by a marketing grifter doesn't mean highly successful startups are like that. They start with good programmers and replace them with monkeys as the company goes to shit. Good programmers don't work for inferior programmers if they can help it.

TIL: higher performing languages are used by code monkeys.

Checks out.

Don't feel bad, guys. I just meant there are brilliant people who come up with innovative ideas and change the world, and they use high level languages like Python and Ruby, and then there are code monkeys, people that just program as a day job. But of course the world needs those too, so don't feel like you are not needed.

According to you almost all startups use Python.

Almost all startups have limited money for salaries. Maybe Python is chosen because Python devs work for the lowest salaries.

Who knows, maybe if they used a different language fewer startups would fail.

 

[J1M]

Isn't that the same? And why they had 300 people in AI departments? AI is typically done in 1-3 people. Max is about 12. (Or are they talking about people who are doing simple scripting the same as about real AI researchers?)

Unity's business plan is to copy Unreal.

When Unreal went heavy into cinema for real-time visualization of characters animated with tracking dots (Warcraft film) and rendering scenes to be projected onto screens as an alternative to green screen (Mandalorian), Unity went hardcore into hiring to sell their tool somehow AI for TV production.

 

[J1M]

Do you have something better that I could use?

It's just a small project, I could try to do it in batch files but that would be too limited, eventually they will want more features I think. And it's psychological, it makes people feel "uneasy" to use batch files.

It's basically just to merge csv files into larger ones, based on some requirements and metadata like dates and ids.

.NET APIs?

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Almost all startups have limited money for salaries. Maybe Python is chosen because Python devs work for the lowest salaries.

Who knows, maybe if they used a different language fewer startups would fail.

Maybe large corporations that outsource their development abroad (to India or Eastern Europe), where those companies typically use languages like Java or C# pay less than any startups in US/Western Europe? Argument wrecked... Sorry bro.

 

[J1M]

Almost all startups have limited money for salaries. Maybe Python is chosen because Python devs work for the lowest salaries.

Who knows, maybe if they used a different language fewer startups would fail.

Maybe large corporations that outsource their development abroad (to India or Eastern Europe), where those companies typically use languages like Java or C# pay less than any startups in US/Western Europe? Argument wrecked... Sorry bro.

If you need a Java or C# dev and can't afford a good one I suppose that's an option.

If the coding quality was the same, I would expect more successful tech firms founded in those places.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

I am just saying your claim about Python being lower paid doesn't carry water bre.

 

[Burning Bridges]

I get that you tried to be the class clown in school because no one liked you but it doesn't work. It just makes everything worse.

 

[gaussgunner]

Maybe large corporations that outsource their development abroad (to India or Eastern Europe), where those companies typically use languages like Java or C# pay less than any startups in US/Western Europe? Argument wrecked... Sorry bro.

If you've outsourced your coding to foreigners, you've already failed.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

I get that you tried to be the class clown in school because no one liked you but it doesn't work. It just makes everything worse.

I am arguing with facts and clear reason. The rest of you just get butthurt from said facts, and start throwing badly constructed insults around.

Maybe large corporations that outsource their development abroad (to India or Eastern Europe), where those companies typically use languages like Java or C# pay less than any startups in US/Western Europe? Argument wrecked... Sorry bro.

If you've outsourced your coding to foreigners, you've already failed.

Careful, a lot of outsourced programmers in this thread.

 

[gaussgunner]

Careful, a lot of outsourced programmers in this thread.

Who cares? They're based.

 

[kepler]

According to PorkyThePaladin quality and performance doesn't matter so only thing left is price and when talking price west can't compete with Slavs.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Quality definitely matters, it's just that you equate quality with performance and purely technical aspects, which is much less important today due to faster hardware, and I associate it with things like the quality of the business logic, the productivity of the team churning out code, etc.

Performance can matter in certain areas, but in many programming jobs, it's a secondary concern now.

 

[kepler]

Quality definitely matters, it's just that you equate quality with performance and purely technical aspects, which is much less important today due to faster hardware

This is not true and I've already posted why couple of pages ago.

TBH I now hope there is more people thinking like you so humble potatoland programmers can have a job. Thank you PorkyThePaladin

 

[Tramboi]

Performance can matter in certain areas, but in many programming jobs, it's a secondary concern now.

At last you said something correct.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Quality definitely matters, it's just that you equate quality with performance and purely technical aspects, which is much less important today due to faster hardware

This is not true and I've already posted why couple of pages ago.

No, you didn't. You just stated your opinion, which happened to be wrong.

TBH I now hope there is more people thinking like you so humble potatoland programmers can have a job. Thank you PorkyThePaladin

You guys get the boring jobs no one here wants. Keep working on that middleware.

 

[Not.AI]

Who knows, maybe if they used a different language fewer startups would fail.

:100%:

If the coding quality was the same, I would expect more successful tech firms founded in those places.

Yes and no - sort of.

The real problem today and in the past is there is almost no way to get VC in most places of the world, or else it is possible but requires so much more networking than is available to most businesses.

Business that have a good product that consumers actually want cannot get past gatekeeping to the market in the very first round in most places in the world.

Most places traditionally conflate social status and property, they are not as clearly separated. In most places, no status means no road to property. If you somehow have property without social status you may soon have no property.

Competence and wealth are easier to get than social status and networking, which, after all, is why classical capitalism has been the most productive system in all of history.

Spoiler

"Hollywood", "Silicon Valley", "London", "New York", are places where capital has been more available, for a specific sector perhaps, to people who are not already part of a very definite social circle to begin with.

Even in places like Switzerland it is not as easy for a startup, however good their team, product, and business plan, to get sufficient capital. Even if already highly profitable. They don't know anybody.

The problem today, of course, is that this does not scale with population: evaluating a proposal fairly, carefully, and at length is no longer a thing when the number of proposals is 30000/year rather than 300/year, and the result is again too much circle jerking, which means business aspects of business don't matter until social status aspects are satisfied, which is a Catch 22. Social status aspects are usually satisfied by success in business: purchased.

Furthermore, that open culture in "Hollywood", "Silicon Valley", "London", "New York" may have already passed away. And they are now like all other places. As we can see. Too bad.

So much for the tales of economic history anyway.

 

[kepler]

Quality definitely matters, it's just that you equate quality with performance and purely technical aspects, which is much less important today due to faster hardware

This is not true and I've already posted why couple of pages ago.

No, you didn't. You just stated your opinion, which happened to be wrong.

Death of Moore's Law is a opinion? Do you need a hug?

You guys get the boring jobs no one here wants. Keep working on that middleware.

Thank you brother! Just keep instagram and such for yourself and we all will be happy. :*

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Quality definitely matters, it's just that you equate quality with performance and purely technical aspects, which is much less important today due to faster hardware

This is not true and I've already posted why couple of pages ago.

No, you didn't. You just stated your opinion, which happened to be wrong.

Death of Moore's Law is a opinion?

It means nothing (much like everything else you say). So hardware is not doubling twice in power every year or whatever it was. Do you really think average business applications are doubling in programming language performance requirements every year?

Do you need a hug?

Sure, tell your moms to swing by.

You guys get the boring jobs no one here wants. Keep working on that middleware.

Thank you brother! Just keep instagram and such for yourself and we all will be happy. :*

At least Instagram has users and some interesting functionality (if you look at it in the context of a program and not the thots and all that). Working on some firmware that nobody ever sees that is like the underlying plumbing connecting other shit, meh, keep it.

 

[Azdul]

So hardware is not doubling twice in power every year or whatever it was. Do you really think average business applications are doubling in programming language performance requirements every year?

Andrei Alexandrescu - when he was research scientist at Facebook - said that improving performance of their main application by 1% - is worth 10x the yearly salary of most senior programmer / architect.

It's not uncommon for successful companies to double number of users / customers each year - until they reach the scale where even small improvement is worth millions of $$$.

And with Amazon / Azure you are paying 10x the money for each 2x improvement in instance performance.

But to have such rich peoples' problems you need to be successful in the first place - so it does not really matter for large majority of startups. It's the same in astronautics - it does not matter if satellite / orbiter was less then ideal if the rocket exploded during takeoff.

 

[kepler]

It means nothing (much like everything else you say). So hardware is not doubling twice in power every year or whatever it was. Do you really think average business applications are doubling in programming language performance requirements every year?

When you can't get more from hardware you need to make software more performant and it's not about doubling, it's about any performance gain. And you know that.

Sure, tell your moms to swing by.

Just click any "MILFs in your area" ad. Dude are you inefficient in every aspect of your life?

At least Instagram has users and some interesting functionality

Adding photos and comments section. Interesting indeed.

So hardware is not doubling twice in power every year or whatever it was. Do you really think average business applications are doubling in programming language performance requirements every year?

Andrei Alexandrescu - when he was research scientist at Facebook - said that improving performance of their main application by 1% - is worth 10x the yearly salary of most senior programmer / architect.

It's not uncommon for successful companies to double number of users / customers each year - until they reach the scale where even small improvement is worth millions of $$$.

And with Amazon / Azure you are paying 10x the money for each 2x improvement in instance performance.

But to have such rich peoples' problems you need to be successful in the first place - so it does not really matter for large majority of startups. It's the same in astronautics - it does not matter if satellite / orbiter was less then ideal if the rocket exploded during takeoff.

Very much this.

 

[Rincewind]

Do you really think average business applications are doubling in programming language performance requirements every year?

You're joking, right? Programmers have been getting sloppier each year (companies going for the "Most Viable (shit) Product" is often to blame too, to be fair), so much that even with the performance doubling every 3 years or so the net effect has been software been getting _slower_, and not by a small margin. My blood pressure always goes up a little before I need to edit some diagrams in Confluence; everything is so sloooow in these marvellous Web2.0 apps, sometimes I just say fuck it, I edit the diagram locally in Inkscape or whatever then just upload a PNG.

Seriously, I miss the snappiness of old Amiga and MS-DOS software that JustWorks(tm), and quickly. Guess what, there's still good software that is fast and not bloated (e.g. Blender, REAPER), but usually those guys compile their carefully optimised code to native binaries.

 

[FreshCorpse]

Do you really think average business applications are doubling in programming language performance requirements every year?

You're joking, right? Programmers have been getting sloppier each year (companies going for the "Most Viable (shit) Product" is often to blame too, to be fair), so much that even with the performance doubling every 3 years or so the net effect has been software been getting _slower_, and not by a small margin. My blood pressure always goes up a little before I need to edit some diagrams in Confluence; everything is so sloooow in these marvellous Web2.0 apps, sometimes I just say fuck it, I edit the diagram locally in Inkscape or whatever then just upload a PNG.

Seriously, I miss the snappiness of old Amiga and MS-DOS software that JustWorks(tm), and quickly. Guess what, there's still good software that is fast and not bloated (e.g. Blender, REAPER), but usually those guys compile their carefully optimised code to native binaries.

IMO: way too many new people into the field over the last 10-20 years. Impossible to inculcate them all many of them now have the 10 years of experience that many assume qualifies them to take senior positions.

It's gotten far worse since covid. My firm has an intake of new grads each year in Aug/Sept. Most of the ones from 2 years ago (ie: mid 2020, so have spent a majority of their career WFH) have simply not advanced to the point we can think of them as a safe pair of hands and we are not sure what to do about it. I have a feeling we will just dismiss them, as painful as that is given the investment we've made in them. Decision time is coming up - by the end of next month we either dismiss them or we have 3 cohorts of grads rather than the usual 2. 2021 cohort is a bit better looking but perhaps too early to say.

Programmers only seem to get better when they are in mixed ability groups where the less experienced can pickup skills and get direction on what to study. It almost seems like a medieval guild/apprenticeship system would be the thing.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

So hardware is not doubling twice in power every year or whatever it was. Do you really think average business applications are doubling in programming language performance requirements every year?

Andrei Alexandrescu - when he was research scientist at Facebook - said that improving performance of their main application by 1% - is worth 10x the yearly salary of most senior programmer / architect.

It's not uncommon for successful companies to double number of users / customers each year - until they reach the scale where even small improvement is worth millions of $$$.

And with Amazon / Azure you are paying 10x the money for each 2x improvement in instance performance.

It means nothing (much like everything else you say). So hardware is not doubling twice in power every year or whatever it was. Do you really think average business applications are doubling in programming language performance requirements every year?

When you can't get more from hardware you need to make software more performant and it's not about doubling, it's about any performance gain. And you know that.

You guys are arguing against your own arguments... Kepler here invoked the death of Moore's law, which said hardware doubles every year or whatever. Because it died, doesn't mean hardware stopped improving, it still improves all the time, just not as dramatically. So 1% increase in Facebook performance or any performance gain can still be achieved quite easily by improved hardware, and doesn't need to rely on high speed programming languages.

Sure, tell your moms to swing by.

Just click any "MILFs in your area" ad. Dude are you inefficient in every aspect of your life?

But then I won't get that priceless sad puppy look on your face... Oh Porky, are you porking my momma again?

At least Instagram has users and some interesting functionality

Adding photos and comments section. Interesting indeed.

Beats optimizing pointer arithmetic for memory allocation, dawg.

But to have such rich peoples' problems you need to be successful in the first place - so it does not really matter for large majority of startups. It's the same in astronautics - it does not matter if satellite / orbiter was less then ideal if the rocket exploded during takeoff.

Exactly, most companies don't even have Facebook or Instagram or Youtube volume, so if many of those companies can make Python work, imagine what it can do for your shitty 10 visits a month app.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Do you really think average business applications are doubling in programming language performance requirements every year?

You're joking, right? Programmers have been getting sloppier each year (companies going for the "Most Viable (shit) Product" is often to blame too, to be fair), so much that even with the performance doubling every 3 years or so the net effect has been software been getting _slower_, and not by a small margin. My blood pressure always goes up a little before I need to edit some diagrams in Confluence; everything is so sloooow in these marvellous Web2.0 apps, sometimes I just say fuck it, I edit the diagram locally in Inkscape or whatever then just upload a PNG.

Seriously, I miss the snappiness of old Amiga and MS-DOS software that JustWorks(tm), and quickly. Guess what, there's still good software that is fast and not bloated (e.g. Blender, REAPER), but usually those guys compile their carefully optimised code to native binaries.

No programming language will save you from shitty programmers. In fact, I already stated earlier in this thread that bad code (along with db connections, network latency, IO, etc) causes a lot more performance hits than a programming language selection. One nested loop somewhere in the code, or the n+1 db retrieval problem or bad caching will fuck your app over way worse than anything Python can do.