Re: Tragic NIH Syndrome

Tragic NIH Syndrome (Score: 1, Insightful)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-06-03 17:20 (#20K)

Why is every successful company so enamored of the smell of its farts that it has to invent its own programming language? Google did it, Apple's doing it; back in olden times there were flavors and branding but Fortran was more or less Fortran, COBOL (blargh) was COBOL, PL/1, etc., etc.

If code is code, and interoperability speeds progress for everyone, what's with pervasive Not Invented Here syndrome?

It ends up leaving us all relying on lowest common denominator CRAPOLA like JavaScript.

Re: Tragic NIH Syndrome (Score: 0)

by maxim@pipedot.org on 2014-06-06 22:07 (#213)

Its two words: vendor lock-in.
Having your own language that is only available on your platform and has tons of legacy software written in it is the wet dream of all these corporations.
Thats why we are still stuck in the world of C/C++, as its the only compiled language that is guaranteed to be cross platform, and doesn't suck completely, (but still sure sucks).

Re: Tragic NIH Syndrome (Score: 3, Interesting)

by marqueeblink@pipedot.org on 2014-06-07 17:13 (#215)

The big vendors lock app developers into their platform via APIs and services. The role of the programming language is really secondary. Really, I think Apple and Google are innovating here, not in a large sense (as Java was back in the '90s, or C++ in the '80s) but incrementally improving on current practice, which is what they should be doing.

Re: Tragic NIH Syndrome (Score: 2, Interesting)

by maxim@pipedot.org on 2014-06-07 21:21 (#216)

The problem with APIs is that for each API one can make cross platform wrapper, and its works damn well
Even DirectX which was microsoft flagship api to lock the users like you say can be wrapped, and some games do this.

On the other hand, an language, locks you very hard to vendor's platform. For instance if your code is in C# your only hope is Mono and with that your
code probably be always of 2nd citizen quality on non MS platforms which is what MS wants.

About Go, I think you are right, chances are that is was really created as a research project at least without initial goal of vendor lock-in, something also evident from the fact that they did LInux, Mac, Windows, and even FreeBSD releases of their compiler.

But swift... I could only imagine how badly its entangled with Apple libraries...

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