

Forbes: What is the most valuable programming language to know for the future? - kevinSuttle
http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/07/14/what-is-the-most-valuable-programming-language-to-know-for-the-future-and-why/

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runjake
I can't help but focus on the failings of the reasoning of the answer given
here. I keep getting flashbacks to the late 1990s when you got that answer,
but swap "Javascript" for "Java".

I am failing to find sound reasoning behind the answer, which is essentially
"Just learn Javascript, ok?".

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nostrademons
If you learned Java in the late 1990s you did _very_ well. Java remained the
gateway into many corporate jobs well into the 2000s; all sorts of dot-coms,
consulting, enterprise rewrites, and even startups and open-source projects
were open to you. It wasn't until 2005 that Ruby/Python/JS started getting
hot; before then people used PHP for webapps and Perl for scripting, but they
were still nowhere near as general-purpose as Java.

An 8-year run is pretty darn good for a technology in our industry. Pretty
much the only thing that's bested it is C's impressive 30+ year run. And C was
really only the hot, commercially successful language to learn during the late
microcomputer era of 1985-1991, before which the hot language was assembly
(for microcomputers) or Lisp (for enterprise), and after which C++ took over
the microcomputer market.

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coldtea
Not to mention Java is still the #2 language used, and #1 on the enterprise.

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cenhyperion
Question was originally on Quara, and there are a lot of other compelling
answers there.

[http://www.quora.com/Computer-Science/What-is-the-most-
valua...](http://www.quora.com/Computer-Science/What-is-the-most-valuable-
programming-language-to-know-for-the-future-and-why)

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firebrand39
go (golang, google language) is pretty cool too. They are pulling a lot of
good things together from other languages (c++, java) but leave out the
useless/once fashionable/error prone stuff. It even has pointers (which I like
because they are fast).

Best of all it has super duper easy concurrency baked in (compared to java
threads), which really allows a lot more programmers to really use all those
cores, even on their notebooks (I love seeing top at 400% on my notebook (4
cores):-)

Also it has garbage collection and is compiled to native machine instructions
so it is really fast. And you'd be surprised how much the 1.3 release has
matured already even with still lacking libs.

Apart from an as-yet sparse eco-system, what is not to like.

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serge2k
lack of generics is one of the complaints I have heard quite a bit.

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firebrand39
That's probably more a matter of taste. Go has a reflect package which allows
the programmer to determine type at runtime, making generics unnecessary. It
may not be as convenient and familiar as generics. Here is an example
[http://play.golang.org/p/a18VESulWS](http://play.golang.org/p/a18VESulWS)

~~~
coldtea
> _That 's probably more a matter of taste. Go has a reflect package which
> allows the programmer to determine type at runtime, making generics
> unnecessary._

That's not "making generics unnecessary". That's "using an ugly hack that
throws typesafety away instead of a proper solution".

And it's more familiar than generics, that's what Java had before they
understood that they had to have generics.

~~~
firebrand39
Well, you are right it reminded me of method overloading. Otherwise I think
time will tell. In the end generics are just types with parameters, for
creating typed permutations _at_compile_time_ of functions/maps etc.. And as
you said, java worked quite a while without them.

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kevinSuttle
I posted the quick story of how this happened.
[http://kevinsuttle.com/posts/quora-javascript-
forbes/](http://kevinsuttle.com/posts/quora-javascript-forbes/)

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mvanhalen
Nowadays one language isn't enough. But the java syntax styled langues like
java, c#, javascript and swift will get you anywhere. With some additional
html, css, and maybe xaml for the styling.

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mklappstuhl
Actually thats "What is the most valuable runtime to target for the future?",
right?

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gexla
A: Depends on the value of the things you are building with that programming
language.

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brennanm
Atwood's Law: JavaScript

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collyw
unfortunately I have to agree.

