When and How to Win With New Programming Languages

Life is short and burdened with tedium. Automation is one of our most potents for escaping tedium, but our prime tool for creating automation—the programming language—is itself surprisingly resistant to change. In this talk I'll make the case for adopting new programming languages, and look at the conditions when a language could and should be adopted in a commercial setting.

Getting more done in less time is a worthwhile goal, if only because life is short. For programmers, process and software libraries can help but one of the most potent forces for improving productivity is improving the programming language. However this is a relatively infrequent occurence. While the field of programming language research advances rapidly the most commonly used languages, such as Java and Python, are still based on ideas from 1980s.

There are signs of progress, though. Scala has a large community. Typescript is gaining popularity in the world of front end development. Rust is the hot new thing (but will it actually gain traction?) Even Haskell is getting more use, largely in the world of blockchain startups. Can we determine the conditions that will make a previously obscure language successful? When is it a good idea to invest in a new language in a commercial setting? How can one successfully adopt a new language? These are the questions I’ll tackle in my talk, based my experiences working with Racket and Scala, and what I’ve seen happening in the industry at large.