Peter wrote:
All that does is selects for clever programmers who can get their head around these weird languages. And they are scarce, so very expensive, and cannot be fired. Those people could write as reliable stuff in C, or (much more slowly) in assembler. Or Fortran I’ve seen so many of these claims. Used to know an old guy who kept saying how Forth is great for safety critical systems… Well, almost nobody could understand it, so those who could were super clever and produced good code
It is all about what you’re used to. We start teaching functional languages (like Haskell, Erlang…) and students do just fine.
They just have to get a job at Ericsson, but that’s no problem, with 104k employees 
Weird languages are loved by CS teachers (it was Pascal in my time) but tend to be unusable in the real world.
This, after all, was just a stupid design decision.
Thing is upper management might end up telling them to use Python/Java/Osmo1 because everyone else and their dog are.
The languages are niche, but so is the subject matter where they are most applicable. Which often means paying more for a good developer is possible, and cost effective, but see above about management.
That said, our endeavour to provide outsourced teams of developers writing code in functiona languages where it made sense failed, while people still keep on paying us money for stuff done in ‘language of the day’ by the same guys for the same amount of money without batting an eye.
Python is in vogue today for embedded systems too. I looked at implementing it on a product I am developing now (a customer programmable (in C) protocol converter with some analog features) but decided it will be out of fashion in 10 years’ time. It would have also eaten all remaining RAM; about 50k Don’t even ask about the execution time overhead.
Osmo looks fun I had never heard of it.
The NATS stuff is mostly in Java but they can throw enough CPU power at it to work OK.
AFAICT it is nothing to do with any language. It might have been done in Visual Basic Just a dumb way of handling errors…
It’s really hard to beat C for embedded/systems level development. On the projects I’m working on (large one on an ARM SoC quite a lot of memory, small one on RISC-V with 128k of RAM) the amount of control you’ve got over things like memory layout, especially when you get into linker scripts – and how you can see how things in the source code end up in memory, is really hard to beat.
However, don’t knock Java for big systems – Java is actually very quick these days, with good JITs, and on server-class hardware there’s often little CPU usage benefit from using C for the application side especially when you consider the benefits the language brings. The Java ecosystem (which is probably mostly off-limits to the developers at NATS!) is also very good and is probably the reason why Java remains a lot more popular than C# despite everyone hating Oracle more than they hate Microsoft. The JVM also has more than just Java now.
Just a dumb way of handling errors…
Couldn’t put it better myself! It would have been just as disastrous in Haskell or PDP-8 assembler.
Python is a truly awful language for anything longer than one screenful. That said, I am 100% sure it will still be around in 10 or 20 or even 30 years. It has been going strong and getting stronger for 20 years now. Its big advantages are that it is really easy to code in, and there are libraries available for just about anything you want to do.
The problem is that once your program gets bigger than a screenful or two, the absence of any compile-time type checking makes it just about impossible to make significant changes, and practically certain that there will be obscure corner cases where function x() expects an int but someone passes it a string, or whatever.
Personally I like Kotlin, which is kind of Python-esque but with rigorous compile time type checking. However it is just as obscure as Haskell or Scala, and the build system truly sucks. I wouldn’t dare use it for anything “professional” because of the impossibility of finding anyone to maintain the code.
Python is essentially today’s BASIC, but with significant whitespace.
Edsger Dijkstra said of BASIC “It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: As potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”
Hopefully the same is not true of Python!
Kotlin is now the “preferred language” for Android development so I’m not sure it’s that obscure these days (unfortunately for Java programmers, Android significantly lags behind on Java support these days – I think it’s still largely Java 7 and a lot has happened since then). Unfortunately nearly all of the Kotlin developers are Russian – who knows how much control the Russian state might have over them if they want to backdoor the Android ecosystem.
