How Many Languages Do Developers Need To Know?

Big tech companies keep creating programming languages to serve their own platforms and business goals. The article uses Swift, Hack, Dart and Go as examples and says this can simplify work inside one ecosystem while also tying developers more closely to that ecosystem.

Reading notes

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• Apple’s Swift, Facebook’s Hack, and Google’s Dart and Go are presented as part of a recent wave of company-built languages.
• The article says companies use new languages to support their specific business objectives and to keep developers within their platforms.
• Swift is described as a way to simplify iOS development while requiring iOS and Mac OS X developers to learn a new language.
• Facebook created Hack because existing languages were hard to fit into its PHP-based codebase and infrastructure.
• Hack was designed to improve code reliability through data-type checking before execution.
• Companies can build a language more easily than they can build the support around it, such as libraries, APIs, compilers and documentation.
• The article says developers already learn multiple languages, but habit and existing needs shape whether they adopt a new one.
• A freelance designer quoted in the piece says constantly adding new languages can overburden programmers and fragment the developer community.
• The article ends by saying new languages may fit specific problems better, even if they make change harder for developers.