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It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It
- Upton Sinclair (allegedly)
Remember Rails? You could get a website up and running very fast. It was great for prototyping. But aside from selling books and conferences, it didn't accomplish anything new. The last "RoR" gig I had involved migrating a rails site to Dancer (perl) because the client wanted to have fewer developers and they already had experienced Perl devs. I'm not sure why they ever went to the trouble of having a rails site in the first place, but I think it had something to do with a slick sales pitch that promised a lot of ponies to management.
I get that php and the like kind of suck to code in, but who cares? The web is a narrow set of problems. Most web-dev is a CRUD app with a custom front end, so if the goal was to not program in a language you dislike for aesthetic reasons, maybe we'd all be better off making php code generators in bash.
Either way, it's a pointless siloing of human effort to have `ruby guys`, `python guys`, and `Perl guys`. Oh now we're doing everything in Go? Time to buy some new books and learn how to navigate NEW pitfalls because when we fixed $old_lang's problems we made new ones.
Expanding on the above, I will start by saying not all languages and improvements are pointless. Some grey beards are still mad at C++ because it made their custom C vector implementation pointless, but there is a kernel of truth to the idea that you can pretty much do anything with one turing complete language that you can with another. When it comes to languages that fit into the same performance and comprehensibility brackets, it comes down to community and personal aesthetic preferences. The thing is, if you think about computing in terms of raw materials mined from the earth and human talent expressed in labor hours, preferring to read `puts "foo"` over `print("bar");` probably wasn't worth the effort of thousands of engineers learning a new set of tooling while even higher paid engineers are forced to work on the problem of making it all run acceptably fast.
As someone who is quite proud of the elegance of my Xmonad config, I have to admit my desktop is not more functional than it was when I used a different WM that used C for config. Learning Me a (little) Haskell was fun, but it's no basis for organizing human labor around. No doubt, people like Larry Wall and Matz are also having a lot of fun, but I get the feeling that Perl 6 isn't going to solve any unresolved computer science problems.
Why is the tech world like this? Ostensibly it's so they can hire cheaper labor. It's easier to find someone who can grok a bit of Python today than it is find someone who would even dare touch a mature C codebase without a week of study, but that doesn't explain the bifurcation of mid-level scripting languages. If you have the aptitude to read and write Lua, your brain is also capable of understanding Python, Perl, Ruby, Go, etc.
The real reason is to control the number of "middle class" jobs. It's well documented that companies like Google and Meta hire a surplus of people and make lot of them basically work on projects that never see the light of day. Some percentage of people need to have "good jobs", or the entire illusion of Capitalist Realism falls apart. They don't want smart people to think about the system we live in, they want them living in the la la land of consuming and tackling abstract intellectual puzzles. Since paying people six figures to solve sudoku boards is a little suspicious, they have them do stuff like completely re-invent how javascript projects are done every 4-5 years. Zuckerberg wasn't keen on React because vanilla js was incapable of rendering a block of structured data into html, it was to keep a bunch of junior devs busy so nobody has the time or energy to think about the moral or practical implications of billionaires being allowed to control society.
I've discussed this topic with many non-managers in tech. They all "get" it, but they're also self-aware enough to know that you don't go around talking about these sorts of things. It's like discussions around unions or salary: yes, if we all knew what our co-workers were making then we could all bargain for better wages...but if you don't keep your head down and tow the line then you're putting a target on your back for when the next round of layoffs happens.
When it comes to questioning the environmental concerns directly connected to the very business model of your company, the people willing to do so are driven out while the "don't rock the boat" people become more entrenched. We've all seen how unionization efforts at Google were treated. So it doesn't surprise me that all these supposedly well educated people who technically aren't climate change deniers aren't going to tell management that making more shit for people to consume is a suicide pact padded with consumer comforts.
So here I am left with the choice to be a massive hypocrite or continue to live in poverty. I apply to these god-forsaken biosphere annihilating jobs with a fake smile like everybody else. All for what? For the vague hope that making enough money to pay for adequate treatment for my chronic illness will at least take away my pain briefly? I hate this. I want to fight the systems that are making a 2c rise in average global temperature inevitable but instead I am begging them for healthcare. My moniker on twitter before I abandoned it was "will code for food" and I guess that's just the sort of pathetic person I am.
Hey startup that wants to help people find travel deals, thus making it more likely that future generations can never enjoy travel themselves, I'll help you develop your app! How about this company over here who wants to make housing even more unaffordable, I'll help you optimize your search queries to keep your infra costs down! Just give me money so I can afford my $3000 a month supply of immunosuppressants! I HATE IT HERE! LET ME OUT