David Herron's Blog

People don't care about the programming language used to write their apps?

A commenter on a previous blog posting suggested "Consumers dont care about programming languages, they just want solution" ... there is so much truth in that, and it's easy to just let that statement stand because of the truth within the statement.

We the people want good quality products, right? And I suppose it isn't important at all how those products get to us, how they're made, etc.

Speaking for myself ... maybe I'm a strange weirdo, but I care a lot about the full wholistic picture of the products and services around me, and a lot more attributes than whether the resulting product is good quality or not.

A high quality product is of course important ... But every product carries along with it a set of extraneous attributes and side effects. Such as the pollution made in the factory that produces the product, or the pollution produced by the trucks and trains etc that transport the product to the store. If you only look at the end result then it's easy to miss those other effects.

For example ... electrons are electrons, so you might wonder .. does it make any difference what kind of electric plant produced those electrons? Coal or Wind? Nuclear or Solar? See, electric production from e.g. Coal carries extraneous attributes of acid rain and extreme pollution. Electric production from nuclear material results in highly poisonous "wastes" which require 10's of thousands of years of storage before they become relatively safe.

If you only look at the end result - electrons - you'll miss the poisons spewed into the environment from the source of your electricity. And those poisons are acting to damage our health, and to skew global weather, and to cause the melting of the icecaps.

To get back to the original question ... What does it matter which programming languages were used in developing a given application?

I think I'll leave that as an exercise to the readers ...

Comments

• Hello,
  I like your thoughts. Especially the way you related the caring for programming languages to Global Warming. Well, I would say that its high time people get over "the ends justify the means" attitude. Be it programming or any other field of life. The means are as important as the ends. One should remember that.

  Posted by: peter_forrester on July 06, 2007 at 07:20 AM

• depends on the people answering the question:

  a programer: yes, yes, yes..!
  a manager: code is commodities
  a tech salesman: of course it is very important, and we have the best language for you!
  a costumer: lang what ?

  Posted by: felipegaucho on July 09, 2007 at 04:10 AM

• and people usually assume they care about how stuff works, but at the end nobody really knows and almost nobody cares about what is going on behind the scene :) Click here to watch a very disgusting film about the idea of side-effects and conscience ... be aware the film is really dirty and disgusting ...

  Posted by: felipegaucho on July 09, 2007 at 04:14 AM

• Does it make any difference what kind of [artist] produced those [paintings]?

  I think software engineering lives somewhere between your example and mine. Let me guess, this is food for thought, bait if you will right?
  

  Posted by: tcowan on July 09, 2007 at 06:43 AM

• How often have you seen customers at Bestbuy or Mediamarkt (or pick your pick of software retailers) ask the question "but what programming language was it written in, that's important for me to decide if I want to buy it" from a saleskid? And of those questions, what percentage was answered truthfully (rather than the kid just making something up on the spot because he of course doesn't know or care himself), and of those answers how many led to a non-purchase?
  Closest estimate I've seen is 0 on the first, which of course automatically causes a 0 for the others. Of course I don't spend days and days watching people look at software to buy, but I do feel that it's pretty close to actuality.
  Personally, as a developer myself, I don't care much either. As long as it works as it should I couldn't care less whether it was created in Java, C++, or Fortran. Maybe were I to order a piece of custom software complete with code delivery I'd like it to be in a language I actually know myself so it gets easier to modify the stuff, but that's irrelevant for shrinkwrapped software which makes up the majority (certainly in volume and likely in money as well) of software sales worldwide.
  So the only place where the language it's written in is important to the customer is in custom software where the customer expects at some point to have to modify the software themselves without help from the supplier (and will have received the code to do so), AND expects that time to be relatively close (else any prediction about what knowledge about that language they'll be able to have or acquire cheaply will be a wild guess anyway).
  Maybe a small group of fanatics refuses to use anything not written in XXXXX, just as a small group of fanatics doesn't want to do business with company YYYYY, but those are fringe groups, hardly a serious factor in any real computation (and you'd have to wonder if you want such hardliners as customers, they're likely to abandon you on the slightest disagreement and launch a smearcampaign).

  "... electrons are electrons, so you might wonder .. does it make any difference what kind of electric plant produced those electrons"
  It doesn't matter. I've worked in the energy sector and participated in the analysis of data comparing the "environmental footprint" of different production methods of electricity. All came out pretty much equal when taking everything into account (so not just immediate waste of production but also construction, raw materials for that construction, etc. Worse for the so-called "green" methods, the longterm impact on climate conditions from the largescale capture of wind and tidal energy is a complete unknown, but local changes are already being noticed and are (and were in that study because they were unknown) ignored in calculating the effects on the environment of powerplants.
  That's not to say that there are no advantages to using local resources to produce electricity rather than relying on imported (or otherwise transported over long distances) oil and coal. The reduction of reliance on outside sources is an important benefit, one that shouldn't be overlooked in a world where lines of transportation are vulnerable to terrorist attack and production sources of oil and to a lesser degree uranium ore are located mainly in unstable parts of the world, and thus do not yield a reliable supply.
  Similar with manufactured products. As a consultant in the dairy industry my father was involved in comparing the environmental and economic impact of glass milk bottles and cartons (after being challenged by the green movement that the increasing focus on cartons was bad for the environment). An independent agency took everything into account (as you say, including transport of empty bottles and cartons, cleaning bottles, disposing of waste paper and glass (including realistic recycling rates for both), etc.) and came up with the conclusion that cartons were overall in fact marginally better for the environment than bottles. The green-dominated press of course never published those results, but had published massive headlines about how the dairy industry was destroying the environment with their cartons.
  Customers hardly cared. The sale of bottled milk never recovered (despite bottles still being offered, and in larger numbers again, they're not selling well), the convenience factor of not having to return empty bottles to stores convinced them without having to be told the truth about the green smear campaign.
  

  Posted by: jwenting on July 10, 2007 at 02:33 AM

• In What More Can I Do?, offers an interesting thought ... paraphrasing, it's not the choice of language, but what the choice of language offers and whether the attributes offered by a specific language is important to the customers of an application.

  Posted by: robogeek on July 10, 2007 at 07:57 AM

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