Re: TechRepublic article about languages to avoid in 2018

[KHMan <keinhong@...>]

On 2/27/2018 8:32 AM, Coda Highland wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 6:14 PM, Milind Gupta <milind.gupta@gmail.com> wrote:
> > The most disliked are mentioned in the video but the ones to avoid are in
> > the article.
> >      Unfortunately Lua is in the list of languages to avoid.
> >
> > https://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-5-worst-programming-languages-to-learn-in-2018/
>
> I think the article gets pretty hyperbolic about things, and it
> definitely overgeneralizes.

I never read TechRepublic, they need to make money, so they don't 
bite the hands that feed them.

It's not TechRepublic or their author, they are quite 
inconsequential here. It's actually Codementor spouting the 
propaganda. Codementor has an agenda, they want to be seen as the 
experts to be listened to. They want to be the "mentoring experts" 
or something.

Oh, I see a lot of Chinese names and a Taiwan office. Simples, 
their name is _Codementor_. Their agenda is to capture the eyes of 
those who worry about jobs, careers, paychecks. I guess it's part 
of the Chinese upbringing in some of them -- getting good salaries 
on a safe job or career, that's what their idea is founded upon.

Or put it this way: the good list and the bad list is what the 
writers think they would put on their CVs in order to get their 
dream jobs and salaries. It's like, dang, I spent all college 
coding Lua on WoW and I can't put it on my CV in a respectable way.

Look at Codementor's writers and their focus and how they plan to 
make money and build their community. They are a startup, full of 
young people, and now these young people are trying to be the 
experts on what you should learn. Their advice is not about 
technical merits, it's about your CV and landing desirable jobs.

They have an agenda. They want you to be a good Codementor 
customer, or at least get their name into your brain, and parrot 
their talking points.

> It's probably true that you shouldn't set out to learn Lua in 2018 for
> the purposes of landing a new job. That's a reasonable enough claim.
>
> But to say that you should "avoid [it] at all costs" is inflammatory
> and ridiculous. Unlike Objective-C, which has been relegated to a
> second-class citizen even by its leading proponent, Lua still fits its
> role very well and there's no technical reason not to use it. And
> unlike Erlang and Dart, which were things with big hype and big
> promise that ended up not getting traction, Lua is well-established
> and certainly not going away -- as long as there are World of Warcraft
> mods, Lua will remain. And unlike CoffeeScript, Lua hasn't been
> superseded by advances in the problem it was trying to solve in the
> first place.
>
> The only problem Lua has is that it's stopped GROWING proportional to
> the size of the overall market, not that it's stopped being RELEVANT.
> There are more Lua developers than there are Lua jobs. But that's not
> a reason to avoid Lua at all costs.
>
> It's inflammatory language just to make the article more exciting to
> get more views and therefore more ad revenue.
>
> Save yourself a click, fair reader, and don't bother reading the article.


--
Cheers,
Kein-Hong Man (esq.)
Selangor, Malaysia