Thursday, May 15, 2014

Comparative Programming Languages

Here are a couple of videos from luminaries in the software world that I believe are worth the time to watch.

First is Rob Pike explaining why he created the Go programming language.

OSCON 2010: Rob Pike, "Public Static Void"

That's a short talk of 12.5 minutes.

Far longer at an hour is this talk by "Uncle Bob" explaining what killed Smalltalk and how the same factors could kill Ruby too.

RailsConf 09: Robert Martin, "What Killed Smalltalk Could Kill Ruby too"

Note, that when Bob finishes with the last of his note cards, the talk is NOT over. I urge you to stay in your seat until the end of the video. Patience!

Now to be fair, I'll have to admit that I haven't programmed in Ruby nor Go nor used Rails and I'll even confess to limited experience with Test Driven Development (TDD), but I think I've got to get one of those green wristbands for myself. So if your reaction to the prospect of watching these videos is "Ain't nobody got time for that!", well, as a consolation prize, I'll give you a link to a related, but short to read XKCD comic:

How Standards Proliferate