On Monday, 25 November 2013 at 10:28:12 UTC, Joseph Rushton
Wakeling wrote:
On 25/11/13 11:10, Chris wrote:
That's my point. D had / has it all, while Java is bringing it
in bit by bit
after years, and people have to re-learn Java with every new
update. But maybe
that's by design, because there's a huge Java-certificate
industry out there.
D obtained it over years, too, and has been much less
constrained by the need to support a huge existing user-base
Yes, D could breathe, which only goes to show that
commercialization can seriously slow down the introduction of
useful features.
... I think you are once again letting your distaste for
corporate management get the better of you ;-)
I agree, I wasn't clear about it. Corporate management does not
mean that the product is bad. But it means that a bad product
gets more attention, hype and finally users than a good product
that is not developed within a big corporation. I think it is
only logical that as soon as a language becomes a product
designed within a corporation, the language's design may suffer
from external factors that have nothing to do with language
design itself. As you said, you have to support an existing
user-base. There are marketing issues, the company offers courses
(these have to be re-designed, if the language is being
re-designed). There is a whole array of external factors that
hamper the development of the language. It has nothing to do with
my liking or disliking corporate thinking. It's just a logical
consequence.
C# was Microsoft's answer to Java, to undermine Java and gain
some market shares, and of course in order to do so, they had to
make it (at least a bit) better. But strategic thinking and
marketing played a big role, thus the language is naturally
affected by it.
I'm sure that both C# and Java designers could tell us how much
corporate thinking influences and impedes language design. I'm
almost sure that there is some kind of "corporate ideology". I'm
saying this as someone who actually liked Java and did a lot of
Java programming.
