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On Jun 6, 2006, at 2:42, James Britt wrote:
> > Because I'm a businessperson, I'm always struck that people would
> > question the value of achieving greater acceptance for anything.
>
> Interesting. I'm always stuck by people who don't get think that
> everything is fair game for questioning.
It's worth questioning, because what does "acceptance in industry"
mean for a language?
In my view, it means "average".
It means "Nobody ever got fired for picking X" (canonically, of
course, X=IBM).
It means crunch-time, late nights, and all of the Mythical Man-Month
traps which are also accepted by industry.
Being accepted by industry doesn't actually provide me with anything
other than a few extra buzzword points on my CV.
More importantly, it wouldn't provide my hypothetical manager with
anything other than a false sense of security, and a small dose of
backside-covering warm fuzzy feelings, because the vast majority of
the time it isn't a question of whether or not Ruby/Python/Lisp/Java/
Smalltalk can do it, it's a question of whether or not *I* can do it,
and no amount of industry acceptance will change that.
I think it's pretty much agreed that good programmers don't need
industry acceptance of their tools to do their job.
What we ought to realise is that good managers shouldn't need it either.
matthew smillie.