[Shootout-list] hackers vs. PHBs

[Brent Fulgham]

On 2004-09-25 22:48:31 -0700 Brandon J. Van Every 
<vanevery@indiegamedesign.com> wrote:

> Here we have a fundamental difference of philosophy.  You think the
> shootout is about each 'hacker' having a 'fun time' evaluating 
> languages
> according to personal preference.  I think the Shootout is about 
> 'PHBs'
> looking up 'winning scores' to decide whether to approve the use of 
> some
> newfangled language.  The latter goal requires consistency.  Managers
> don't sit around customizing stuff, they look at the marketing numbers
> and say, "Ok, that's a winner."

Do your PHB's care about concurrency or system safety?  I find that 
most complain
about bugs and system stability , while simultaneously forcing the use 
of languages
like Java and C# on their development teams.

My intention with the Shootout was to show that Lisp, Eiffel, SML, 
Erlang, and so
forth could all provide useful, competitive solutions.

I think in the case of the ML family we can show that we are so close 
to C/C++
performance that the distinction is almost meaningless.

> We should be conditioning the major categories of comparison that 
> people
> use.

Okay -- I can buy that.  What categories would you suggest?

My great frustration is that even with great timings and memory use 
for languages
like SML and even Lisp, PHB's still mandate C++ or Java because of 
vacuous terms
such as "standards-compliant" or "will be easy to find trained 
developers for future work"
or "no one was ever fired for buying IBM", etc.  In these cases, I 
don't know that
the Shootout helps much -- and I find that most of the instances I run 
into *are*
these cases.  :-(

-Brent