OSCON Recap — ‘P’ is for Passion
I had the opportunity to attend OSCON in beautiful Portland, OR this week and thoroughly enjoyed it. It certainly lived up to its billing as having the veritable who's who of the Open-Source community.
No other conference will you find so many representatives of the 'P' languages -- PHP, Python, and Perl. I've sadly ignored the 'P' languages for the most part. Sure, I've periodically used PHP to customize our web infrastructure (blog, forge, etc). I used Perl a long time ago when I work on large UNIX-based software systems, but I wouldn't consider myself a Perl hacker -- although the camel book from O'Reilly is one of my all-time favorites.
These languages are unique in that they inspire a passion for language that is very cool. When I'm at JavaONE, developers don't corner me and say, "I love Java," or "You've got to use Java for your application development -- you'll improve your productivity" or "It's impossible to write ugly Java code."
Java doesn't inspire passion. I've been using it since 1996, version 1.0. Every major application since 1996 that I developed, sold, and lived on was written in Java. Yet, I'm not passionate about it. I was in 1996, but I'm definitely not passionate about it now. Python's been around for almost the same time as Java, Perl's been around for much longer and developers are "giddy" about it.
This is not just a new thing. C# is very new and is quite nice. It was developed by a very cool guy, Anders Hjelsberg (also the creator of Delphi which has a very passionate following), and it is my language of choice for writing .NET applications. However, C# doesn't seem to inspire passion -- even among the .NET community.
Java, C#, and others (C, C++) don't inspire passion because they are the status-quo -- the languages used in the development of most business applications. They achieved this status through the support of major vendors. Sun and IBM hitched their wagon to Java, developed middleware and tools in Java to make it easy for big corporations to adopt. Same for C# and Microsoft. While there are pockets of Perl and Python in big companies, they are not the predominant force.
Look at PHP...it was extremely cool a few years ago. All the tracks at conferences were about PHP and the community grew. A year ago, IBM pledged significant support for PHP in conjunction with Zend, and now the excitement is starting to quell. No one cornered me at OSCON this week to tell me why I should use PHP.
Here's a graph illustrating the adoption vs. cool factor of languages. The challenge for the cool languages is how they increase their adoption without losing the "coolness". The typical pattern is illustrated on the chart.
Prove it
I'm going to propose an alternative way for these languages to grow in adoption: prove it with data. Focus the passion on discovering ways to quantitatively prove that your language is better. I'll let the creative folks in the community determine which metrics are the appropriate ones to use. Proving that a language is superior can be all that's needed to make the business case to increase adoption and usage. Management at big companies (people that pay for things) need proof to jump to technologies because there is risk with it. IBM, Microsoft, and Sun mitigate that risk for them. However, your data can help make the case with or without the big vendors. And because the business case is made by the community -- it maintains the mystique, hype, and excitement around the technology.
I'll end on a challenge for you passionate Python, Ruby, and other hackers (sure Erlang, Haskell, and Lisp aren't excluded): Prove with our data that your language is superior. We'll gladly try out the first proven language on the next project we undertake and will publicly report on our progress. If there's a metric that we don't have that's essential for your proof, send us an email, and we'll see what we can do to add it.
