Does Company-Wide Language "Standardization" Work? 654
RMX asks: "In our company, we're currently going through the debate of standardizing on a computer language for our next set of products. The pro-standardization guys say that a single language (like Java) will save everyone time. The anti-standardization guys are advocating a mixed environment (of languages like Python, Ruby, and C#), and argue that the whole discussion is as silly as a manufacturing firm standardizing on screwdrivers for all their screw/nail/glue fastening needs. Have any of your companies standardized on a language? How well did it go?"
Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:5, Insightful)
They take on unforeseen forms with non-standard characteristics. If your tool can't solve the problem or satisfy the need, you build a new tool that does. It's the human way.
Likewise, your company can standardize methodologies and practices all it wants. But should they ever standardize the tools they use to solve problems
And then someone might be tempted to work hard at trying to make your standard fix it and work. They might spend hours re-inventing the wheel. And what will that get them?
Why, the ability to say, "Yep, and we did it all with one language."
The customer doesn't care how a solution is created. They care that it works and meets their requirements. Rarely have I seen requirements that read "... and it must all be done in the same language."
I am a computer programmer. I make computing devices do what I want. I will use any tool at my disposal, to hell with my employer's proposed "beneficial" restrictions.
In my dictionary, fatalism is the inability to cope with change. Adapt or fail. I am required to adapt to each new language I learn and I hope I never get rusty at that. Confining employees to one language does just that, it gives them a false sense of security and teaches them to think inside their box.
Hello Mr. Rumsfield (Score:3, Funny)
They take on unforeseen forms with non-standard characteristics.
Are you talking about the "known unknowns" and the "unknown unknowns" ????
Re:Depends... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:3, Insightful)
Why, the ability to say, "Yep, and we did it all with one language."
And the fact that I can actually debug all the code that goes into one of our games. I love debugging a C++ callstack that goes in and out of an interpreter a few times. It's bad enough having ten programmers with different approaches to programming without mixing langauges.
Mixing langauges essentially means that a person who introduces a new langauge gets to build themselves (and a few of their pals) a little ghetto where other pr
Re:Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, embedding an interpreter can be a very good idea in some cases (Think Emacs - or a game like Neverwinter Nights for that matter) - but of course only if the benefits outweigh the pretty daunting drawbacks that you point out.
By contrast, having more than one language in a project may make perfectly good sense
Re:Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:5, Insightful)
Do these introducers never get asked to justify their actions?
I dont see a problem with mixing languages, as long as the
choice is a defensible one that moves the project forward.
Making project choices on the basis of "gee, this will look
cool on my resume", or "gosh, I really want to play with this"
on any level ( in language or out ) should, generally, be
disallowed.
Re:Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:4, Insightful)
This attitude may work well in small throw-away projects, but from experience I can tell you, maintaining a mixed language product is hell. Just think about the awful mess you're going to have 5 years down, when you need to do an upgrade. If the whole project is written in one language, you're going to have to find only one replacement compiler/library/development environment - which can be hard enough. If you have a mix of exotic languages, you basically can forget it, just rewrite the whole mess.
The same applies to training. The original developers may have been the biggest guru in the necessary languages, but where are you going to find maintenance drones that are fluent enough in all of them? Training a halfwit well enough to maintain some crappy C-Code is hard enough, trying to train him in C, Ruby, Scheme and Haskell is impossible. And even if you'd succeed, Mr C-Ruby-Scheme-Haskell-Halfwit won't stay once he comes out of training, he'll be gone to the next job before the ink on his new resume dried.
All in all, if you're doing long term projects stay with one language and try not to use too many extra libraries where you don't have the source code available.
Re:Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:3, Insightful)
You could avoid the problem by not hiring halfwits.
Definetly true. (Score:3, Informative)
It's always better to hire the best, and pay for it, but most bosses don't see the value. And some projects can be done by less then the best, if there simple enough (of course, for a non-technical person to figure out which are which are which isn't always so easy)
Re:Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that "Gosh, I really want to play with this" is, especially among hacker types, probably the single most powerful motivator there is. Disallow that, and not only do you lose out on the drive that hackers have to play with something cool, but they get annoyed and disgusted, and probably wind up working less hard on the things that they are told to work on.
Re:Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:3, Informative)
I've had to debug hideous code because developers decided to make use of a technology just to boost their CVs. Programs mixing ADO and DAO because someone added some code and thought they'd try out ADO (even though having consistency in the same program was more important).
My favourite programmers are those who concentrate on delivery. They keep an eye on what's around the corner, but at the same time, have a balanced view of using new tech ov
Re:Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:3, Insightful)
Which causes management to move development to the subcontinent, where such prima donna behaviour is not coddled. You take the man's money, you play by the man's rules. If you can't return value in excess of your salary on those terms, expect to be asking someone if they'd like to Biggie
Re:Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:4, Insightful)
Real projects are a bit different. There are time and budget constraints. The choice of programming language(s) is an engineering consideration, and the choice should be made by the same people who would chose data structures and algorithms.
In the real world, working with more than one programming language can save a lot of time and effort. A competent programmer should know most of these languages anyway, and learning a new one is pretty easy.
Re:Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:5, Insightful)
The parent is speaking of company-wide decisions. It makes a lot more sense to write a video game in C than in PHP, in the general case. It makes a lot more sense to write a web site in PHP, than in C, in the general case. You don't want to force your developers into an awkward scenario by having a company standard tool.
You, surely, can picture the conversation where the writer of the interpreter from your game is told that he cannot use LEX/YACC, because his company standardized on C++. You can't? I was once told this at a meeting.
On your point, however, I can also agree. Needlessly writing code in other languages makes debugging a pain, and reduces your ability to share code inside the project, a place where I imagine that the most reuse is likely to take place.
Still. I can't really see the need for a company-wide decision to standardize on a single language for all of their development.
The distinction between standards and uniformity (Score:5, Insightful)
What needs to be standardized, then, is not the language per-se, but the rules by which a language is selected. The IF statements. If you read through the standards documents on the IETF's website, you are not looking at a single, all-encompassing rule. You are looking at possibly a few thousand rules, with enough logic behind them to determine which rule applies.
In the case of a company picking a programming language, you probably don't need a few thousand rules. A single side of paper should be more than sufficient to cover all the meaningful languages and the cases they apply in.
Rule 1 might be: "If a more precise rule is not defined, programs should be written to the ANSI dialect of C, revision C-99 with all threading assuming the POSIX threading model and other parallelisms within a single computer assuming OpenMP extensions. Where a more precise rule exists, that rule takes precedence over this default action."
For embedded code in web pages, the rule might be: "Except where a specific project requirement dictates otherwise, embedded code within web pages should be written in PHP, revision PHP-5.1"
For transportable bytecode, you might say: "Web-enabled applications, applications needing to run on clients without installation and applications needing to run on otherwise unsupported platforms should be written in Java and compiled to bytecode using a standard Java SDK version 1.5"
For configuration code, you might say: "Automatic configuration files should be written to the standards specified by Gnu Autoconf and Gnu Automake, using the applicable Gnu M4 macros" (Hey, M4 is a language too!)
You'd then have a few more cases for specific types of work the company does a lot of. This may include additional rules requiring C, but that's fine. You want the specifics in there, so that if you want/need to change the default action, it doesn't screw everything up.
If you're defining standards for languages, I'd also define in the same document some standard coding practices (eg: keep namespaces distinct, if you're using javadoc or something similar then comments should follow javadoc's rules, if you're using a code validator that uses comments to embed commands then state what commands should be used and when, if you're using a SCM - a very good idea - then comments to embed details like revision notes, date, etc, should be included in a standard location, etc.)
The upshot is that there's a lot of different things to consider, nobody can just pick one language for all occasions. Well, they can, but the only language that will ALWAYS work for ALL cases is assembly, and I don't think many people really want to write entire applications in assembler any more.
Re:The distinction between standards and uniformit (Score:3, Interesting)
Think of all the scripting that gets done by the network and system administrators to keep everything humming along. It's almost always unrealistic for that staff to fall into line behind a single corporate wide language that was chosen to sup
Re:The distinction between standards and uniformit (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:5, Insightful)
Just to be contrarian... it can work the opposite way as well. Many of my co-workers are scared of C++, but when I added a Python interpreter to the codebase and started implementating some of the program's functionality in Python, they felt comfortable creating and editing Python code.
Re:Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a healthy attitude to have. Once you are scared of the beast you learn to treat it with respect!
The lion tamer that runs into the cage armed with nothing but an innocent air and a blindfold doesn't stay a lion tamer for long;-)
[Unless of course (s)he manages to put the blindfold on the lion, but that is another story and not really a suitable metaphor]
Re:Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:5, Insightful)
You learn all of these things. Then you look at Visual Basic code, and realise that a lot of other people didn't.
Re:Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:5, Insightful)
Why, the ability to say, "Yep, and we did it all with one language."
At the other extreme you've got people writing in whatever they want whenever they come across a problem and end up re-inventing the wheel because either "I don't like Perl!" or "Numbnuts wrote this code in Object Intercal 95, which doesn't have a compiler/interpreter on the platform I need."
And what does that get you?
Why, the ability to say, "Nope, we don't confine our employee's choice of languages." Well that and a morass of code based as much on individual whim as any logical need.
As always, there is a middle ground - having a standard (or standards) with an allowance for justified exceptions.
I see your problem! (Score:3, Insightful)
Standardizing on a language will help a bit with the symptoms of that, I suppose, but unless you address the actual issue, I don't foresee great things for that kind of organization.
Not to get religious, but avoiding problems like this is one of the big "hidden" advantages of pair programming.
Re:Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:3, Insightful)
and ofc if you wan't your java code to run untrusted then its g
Re:Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked for a long time at a big national lab that was mostly a FORTRAN shop. They wanted to use FORTRAN for everything, and it was technically a bad choice for everything, but culturally it was the only solution that would fit without causing a jihad among the old timers. I much prefer C++ for these sorts of things (big complex simulations that must run fast), but had little success in converting the masses, even though it was always faster, more portable, much easier to maintain and handle complexity, and also you can actually hire good C++ programmers.
We were able to do some mixed language solutions (C++, FORTRAN, C, perl, etc.) and they were a nightmare to maintain. in hindsight, I think it would be better to keep the apps all in one language rather than mixing. The biggest problem here is portability. These applications have incredibly long lifecycles, and the platforms change severals times underneath you, which seems to affect the inter-language interfaces the most.
Anyway, it depends a lot on the type of application, lifecycle, target platform(s), etc. but I think in general it is best to pick a single language if at all possible for a particular application that is the best single tool for the job. But, if a different application would be better suited for a different language, go with the different language. Mandating a single language policy across an organization for all projects is counterproductive: use the right tool for the job.
Re:Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:5, Insightful)
Support and maintenance costs go way up when every programmer writes his little chunk of the application completey in his own style. By standardizing, on tools, coding patterns, naming etc, a company makes it less difficult for someone to debug or modify code that someone else wrote.
This is Why We Have the Mess We Do! (Score:3, Insightful)
This is why we have we mess that we have now! If you were an engineer and machinist you would be screaming bloody murder! About 20 years ago the car industry had the problem where they had 20,000 parts that were unique to a car. When a new model was introduced there were 20,000 more parts unique to the car! All of these unique parts were wre
Re:Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:3, Funny)
This reminds me of a guy I worked with couple of years ago. He was a research scientist for a large technology company. The only programming language he knew was LISP. For some reason I don't remember, he was eventually told that he had to begin writing his projects in Java. So he learned just enough to write a LISP interpreter in Java -- and then continued to write all his projects in LISP.
Re:Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:3, Interesting)
That's ... one way of looking at it. A wrong way, but a way nonetheless. Did you ever consider that each extra language costs money (whether the environments are free or not) to implement? Why should I have four languages that all produ
Re:Solutions Should Be Natural (Score:3, Insightful)
Frankly, I think you should standardize on COBOL for your video game product.
A question for you. When you take your car to be serviced, do you feel like effective work is being done when the entire collection of shop tools in the garage fit into a lunchbox?
I've been doing this for thirty years. I have worked, both as management and grunt in highly standardized, and very non-standardized environments.
My take? It's a bell curve. At one end, development anarchy is non-produc
depends on what you code (Score:4, Insightful)
There are a few languages groups:
Special: Sql, Fortran, ASM
Brute force: C,C++
Object: C++, Py, Java, Ruby, Lua
Scripting: Perl, PHP, asp
High level: Haskel, LISP
As Python, Ruby, Lua are all the same and closely related to Java I definitely wouldnt use all of them. You might be well of with one, maximally two from each of the groups you use (appart from the special group:)).
That's my point of view being a person solving a very wide range of problems. But if you just write stuff that doesnt have much inovation (i.e. basic desktop apps.), a single language might suite well enough.
Re:depends on what you code (Score:2)
Re:depends on what you code (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, what makes Lisp high-level over, say, Ruby? And Haskell is a very different thing from Lisp, you know, probably deserving a category of its own (together with Scheme and OCaml).
Then... WTF? Python and Ruby are closely related to Java?!! And Lua, too? Gosh... Lua isn't even object-oriented, for one! Ruby is essentially a bastard child of Smalltalk semantically, highly dynamic, closure-centric - nothing even remotely close to what Java is. Python - it has multiple inheritance and multimethods, again, something Java avoids on purpose. So... er... looks like you don't know what you're talking about, really...
Re:depends on what you code (Score:5, Funny)
Re:depends on what you code (Score:4, Insightful)
About 2 years ago, I went through the same thought process as asked in the original post. I was not encumbered by a large IT department that would dismiss my opinions if I came up with non-mainstream ideas. This led me to a very broad and lengthy search. Here is the result of my quest for an answer:
1 - Application language - Erlang
2 - Brute furce / close to the metal - C
3 - System scripts - Bash
I chose erlang after 8 years of Java programming which was followed by 8 years of Smalltalk. The main reasons for departing the mainstream OO world were concurrency, distribution and conceptual integrity. I found that in large systems what kept me worried most is being able to "prove" that my code worked as the system scaled and became distributed over local and worldwide "clusters". I wanted to be certain that no race conditions or locks occurred (just being able to monitor and restart VMs was not the answer for me). You can get concurrency assurance with Java or any "shared memory" / object pointer based langugage but you need very well written and tested frameworks to fully encapsulate anything that may be touched by more than one thread/process. Solutions like JBoss or other widely encompassing application servers also were not the answer for me as I had to trust that everything the app server did was correct and wading into these projects to find out if things are correct or to fix anomolies is a big challange.
I simply grew tired of writting the frameworks required to encpsulate concurrency and limiting my application code to the nature of the frameworks. Sure, there are many existing frameworks in the Java world that encapsulate the hard work and concurrency for you. But thats exactly the problem: there are many of them. This gets me to the last point of my rational: conceptual integrity. Each Java framework unleashes its own concepts and patterns. I wanted one small set of patterns that are used everywhere. I found this in erlang. It turns out that by making concurrency a first class priority in the language design, the need to invent frameworks and other patterns to encapulate the hard work mostly dissapears leaving behind a clean slate to write your app.
The second category, C, speaks for itself. Occasionally, I need to touch the OS or even bare metal and want a very straightforward way to do this. My C code ends up being very limited, well tested and compartmentalized.
The third category was a tough call. I was tempted to pick Python/Ruby/Lua/Tcl for system scripts. But the bottom line is I didn't really need them and for anything complex, I could write system tools in erlang that were called by Bash. This keeps my usage of Bash simple and maintainable without introducing yet another language.
I realize that my first choice, erlang, brings up the obvious issues of how do you replace programmers easily when you can't find resumes with erlang expertise. I have found that no matter what lagugage you choose, you have to re-train programmers to do things your way and there is a learning curve to introducing anyone new to your IT group. My choice in erlang has not increased the learning curve for good programms I bring on board.
I realize this seems like a giant plug for erlang. It is and it isn't. My rational stands on its one regardless of your choice.
good luck to you...
Re:depends on what you code (Score:3, Funny)
As Python, Ruby, Lua are all the same and closely related to Java
Shh! I am getting near my target... the greatest of all game, the beast I have hunted all my adult life... the Complete and Total Idiot!
Many times in the past I thought I had found him -- but now, now I am sure. Mere ignorance alone _cannot_ explain the statement above! The most awe-inspiring thing is the inclusion of Lua, which is so utterly unlike both Python and Ruby in one way and Java in another way! Without the Lua, it would just be
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Use .NET (Score:2)
thats just stupid (Score:2)
Tell me how much time is saved there?
Its not like its radically different like platforms are in IT environments? The support argument is dumb and each language is better for a particular task.
You can't write shell scripts in java and except the same results in Perl.
I dislike perl for the most part but I am writing an app which uses wget in Un
Re:thats just stupid (Score:5, Funny)
I've never been quite as nervous as when I was asked if I could redo the websites in C.
Thankfully we talked him out of it and he came to his senses.
optimal use yes, just one, no (Score:2)
That's dumb. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, one thing that does need to be standardized is terminology. I'm working on a contract right now for a wireless telco. The hardest part of this project was getting managers from various departments to agree on how this system we're trying to automate is supposed to work, and describe it to me in a way that would allow me to translate it to software. Compounding the proverbial six-blind-men-describing-an-elephant problem was the fact that everybody was using different vocabulary.
Re:That's dumb. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, but I wouldn't presume to tell someone else which brand of backhoe would be least likely to do that.
All languages are the same (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:All languages are the same (Score:2)
I read that article too, years and years ago. I think I kept a copy of it around here somewhere. "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal", I think it was called.
"Pascal is the Cuisinart of modern programming languages
Re:All languages are the same (Score:3, Interesting)
It's still the best tool for the job in some fields.
--
Evan
Re:All languages are the same (Score:2, Funny)
It will be great! (Score:2)
Doesn't surprise me (Score:2)
Right Tool For The Job (Score:2)
Size of your company (Score:5, Insightful)
But the firm had only 9 geeks, so as I said
Danger, Will Robinson (Score:5, Insightful)
Firm-wide standardization drives are
a) usually politically driven, and if you voice the wrong opinion you will be disliked.
b) driven by the incompetents - if they could do something profitable, they would be doing that.
c) out of date by the time they are finalized.
There is no upside here because there is no magic standard that will make things better.
Pick Two (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pick Two (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say, standardize on Java, C#, or C++ (depending on your needs) as your primary language, add your scripting language of choice, then fire anyone who can't handle that. You'll be better off five years down the road than if you'd all built your fiefdoms around the tower of babel and every project becomes a throwaway codebase as the next "best tool" comes along 4 months later.
Any company that can't standardize on a language doesn't really have a coherent vision anyway, and probably is either a bunch of folks pretending to be a consulting firm or will disappear before too long.
(I'm sure I'm going to lose mod points for this reply, seeing what other people have written, but I don't see how any other approach is practical in the long term.)
Re:Pick Two (Score:3, Interesting)
I doubt it works well (Score:2)
Depends on what your company does (Score:2)
If your company has a lot of variety in what you do, then stardardizing is a bad idea. Each language has strengths and weaknesses. To ignore the weaknesses of a language and force it into a situation is usually possible, but not very efficient.
Would you use php to program an office suite? Would you use c++ for a simple web-script? Don't fall for Sun's PR and try t
We chose Java (Score:5, Funny)
Standardized languages, not language standards (Score:2)
A standardized language has been vetted by an organization like ISO, ANSI or ECMA. A few examples would be ANSI C, ECMA C#, and ANSI Common List, but there are obviously many more. Using one ensures (for the most part) that your application will survive no matter what happens to the specific implementation of the language.
Standardization (Score:2)
...but that's not silly at all. Many manufacturing firms do just that.
Programming languages are tools. (Score:2)
Like a single screwdriver? (Score:5, Insightful)
We all know that monoculture can be bad. Besides platform uniformity, strict monoculture opens you up for enterprise-wide vulnerability, and even getting people with a similar, closed mindset. But it also provides for the ability to have a common dialogue with one another. It can be a shared jumping-off point. It keeps you from getting screwed when the one guy at the company who knew mindfuck leaves, and nobody else knows how to read his code.
There are costs and benefits to having, and to deviating from, a standard operating environment. Deviations should be allowed, but the deviations shouldn't be up to the developers, they should be weighed by management (who shouldn't be idiots), and risks and benefits weighed.
Business needs shouldn't be determined by developers. Developers tend to believe in nifty hacks. Code monkeys can love the elegance of using nuance in their code, but there's also a reason that they're not in charge. And it's not just because managers are stupid. Processes may be tedious. They may even be a reason for a developer to hate his job, which isn't good for productivity. Knowing 4 languages, and having the business be dependent upon him may be wonderful from his point of view. But having an employee dictate how things will be done can be destructive to the business. Particularly when he leaves the company for another job, and the new Java guy can't do shit with the Ruby and python.
Some of the pros and cons (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, having each developer work on projects with their own collection of technologies tends cause the maintainance tasks of those projects go back to the original developer. This is generally a bad thing. Having a developer know that no one will ever see their code gives a temptation to take shortcuts that they wouldn't take others. Even more than code reviews, splitting maintanance across developers encourages quality code. You don't want a co-worker cursing your name as they try to add one minor feature to something you've done. ("F'n Andrew! Why'd he do that!").
Different languages and other technologies have their strengths and weaknesses. If they are chosen based on their strengths and not just their familiarity (let alone out and out prejudice) then their should be productivity gains achived from the choices. Of course, that means that this would increase the ramp up time a new developer needs to be very productive.
So if you have high turnover, you want to get new developers productively quickly (which would imply standardizing on as few languages and technologies as possible) and you want to get projects seen by as many developers as possible before the original developer leaves. (If Andrew is long gone, then "F'n Andrew!" can be an excuse given by the maintainance programmer, even if it is groundless.) If you have a lower turnover, then developers start getting a better feel over which technology choices fit in which business scenarios.
If this standardization is being driven by upper management, they are hoping to turn the developer positions into a cookie cutter role.
Re:Some of the pros and cons (Score:2, Interesting)
-- We agree!
"A single language makes each developer easily replacable."
-- Dream on! At Wells Fargo, they have a bunch of hackers that have no concept of design. If you think a similar language helps, I want some of what you're smokin'.
I just read a blog article on what Google does: (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I just read a blog article on what Google does: (Score:3, Interesting)
Pondering further (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pondering further (Score:4, Funny)
Next question?
Re:Pondering further (Score:4, Informative)
And, of course, "Think twice before using RPS for life-threatening decisions."
Lanuages are domain specific. (Score:2)
Try standardizing on a standard set of languages. With Prolog, Haskell, Perl (and perhaps PHP), C, C++, assembler, experience with shell, you pretty much have the majority of problems you'll ever run into (from bare-metal systems to logic to webpage serving) sown up.
Creative people don't like being restricted to
Standardise on Logo (Score:3, Funny)
Better reasons than that... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's impossible to know whether it's a good idea in your case without knowing a lot more about what your company does, but in general a bad technical decision made for a good business reason is better than a bad business decision made for a good technical reason. The first one will cause you headaches down the road, but the second will make sure there's no road to go down. The key is deciding which decisions are good and which only appear to be good.
Be sensible (Score:3, Funny)
In general: an adequate coder can handle Java and bodge C++. A good coder can pick up and use any ordinary language in a week or less, and be fluent and experienced within six months. A guru can handle the oddballs, like lisp and haskell, and make them dance.
Do not expose code monkeys to haskell. You'll pop their fuses, leading to expensive lawsuits, etc.
There is perhaps another viewpoint... (Score:3, Insightful)
Could a layman not ask the question of multiple programming languages being utilised as follows; why do you need to use thirteen different tools to solve the same problem thirteen different times? This is just as foolish... Note I am not talking about solving DIFFERENT problems...
Standardisation is NOT INTENDED as a straight jacket, however it does intend to ensure that faced with the same situation you use the same solution. It is about portability and interoperability, it is about ensuring that if you get hit by a bus an equally competent colleague can pick up where you left off with minimal learning curve. Naturally you should employ process improvement methods after each activity to fine tune the methods!! that goes without saying. Anyway the true Engineer only uses appropriate tools to solve a problem. Sometimes "appropriate" means the tool which is perhaps not the most ideal immediately, but creates the least ongoing burden (for maintenance, interoperability, etc...).
The descision to standardise should be made for one reason only, to IMPROVE your businesses products or processes. If you do not gain from standardising, do not standardise. Likewise, do not resist standardisation just because it is out of your comfort zone, because it makes YOUR life harder even as it yields overall benefits or because you PREFER tool a over tool b. It most certainly not be resisted because it makes your job less secure.
just my $0.02AUD
err!
jak.
We settled on python (Score:5, Interesting)
Argument for Standardization (Score:3, Insightful)
First of all it means that any developer can work on any project. If you have a developer leave, die or go on holiday their projects are not left in limbo while some other developer gets up to speed. In large shops it might not matter so much, but with a small shop of four or five developers it's a different story.
Maintaining a level of professional proficiency in any language means spending time on a regular basis developing in it. Languages and utilities change all the time, and to keep up takes time. I can't imagine a single developer being proficient in more than three languages. For example, I used to do Delphi, but havn't really done anything in it in a couple of years, so I'm not really in touch with it anymore.
From a business perspective its good to concentrate on being good with one technology rather than being mediocre in several. Learning new languages takes time, and so having standardized on one language means not needing to train new employees in several languages, and also keeps the employment pool wide.
It means you can be clear about which projects you are aiming for, who your clients are, and allows you to concentrate on what you are good at. Obviously you don't want to chose a language which paints you into a corner - it must be flexible, generic, well supported by employee availability, and accepted by clients (and yes, some clients do care).
However, that doesn't mean you stop evaluating the options. Right now we are moving from Java technology towards Python. Our bread and butter is still Java, but Python is giving us a faster more effective way to develop web applications without sacrificing our favorite language features. We even mix languages in projects.
However, unregulated use of languages is not permitted because it would mean having no clear strategy for the future support and maintenance of the project. Moving to python for me means moving all our developers to that technology, and making sure we don't lose the company advantages we built up by using Java.
Dilbert - GO FOR IT! (Score:5, Funny)
You get the drift. I am sure that you could generate at least 1,000 pages of samples, criteria, &etc.
Ratboy
For a product line, ok. For a company, god no. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're hiring programmers who are totoally hopeless in other languages, you're not getting very smart programmers.
However, it makes oodles of sense to restrict languages for a certain product. That makes everyone on the team interchangable, and it makes it easy to have a place to plop new hires (who know that language).
However, before you build in a product restriction, you should put an out for performance/library reasons. I think it's silly for a shop to standarize on Java/Python, when you quite often need to make a C/C++ JNI/Swig wrapper to get certain tasks done.
At my firm we do a LOT of Python with C++ performance cores. We do some Expect scripts to interact with interactive programs. If we had standardized down to the point we would have used One And Only One language, then we would have one of many suboptimal situations: Standarizing on Expect would have been silly, TCL is not a full featured language. If we had standarized on Python Only, some of the code that needed to run over HUGE datasets would have taken approximately 15 times longer to complete than the C++ core did. The C++ core took HOURS as it was.
If we had standardized on C++, our dev/debug time would have been much much higher. We also would have had to spend more hiring developers (you can get good python code out of an intern. Good C++ doesn't come out of interns often enough to mention).
Standardizing on C++ isn't really standardizing. For a project to really standardize on C++, you have to pick a subset of that colossus and forbid the rest.
--Michael
Are You Surrounded by Incompetents? (Score:4, Insightful)
Notice a pattern?
If there are enough people in your organization that this issue actually has to be debated, you might as well start looking for an exit -- the company is doomed to, at best, forever wallow in mediocrity. I'm not exagerating. This type of 'discussion' shows a serious disregard for reason, logic, and a lack of respect for wisdom. It's a serious indication that those spearheading the push have no clue what they should be doing in their roles -- they can't figure out how to do real work that would actually be valuable to the company, so they choose to waste their time on this.
There is something else at play here: whoever is pushing for this doesn't trust their developers to make sane decisions regarding development tools. Maybe that mistrust is warranted, maybe it isn't. Either way, you are screwed.
Now, if you were talking about a 5-man startup, it's almost a sure bet that you are all going to be writing in the same language, and you might even all be using the same IDE. Same if you are working in a small team in a larger organization. But a company-wide push to put all your eggs arbitrarily in one basket? Insane. For one, it means that the company will only attract (or keep) programmers who are not interested in developing new skills. And a programmer who is not interested in keeping their toolset current is generally a very poor programmer.
Smart people don't build monocultures on purpose.
Pick Two: It Does Make Sense to Narrow the Field (Score:5, Insightful)
One from - Java, C#
One from - Ruby, Python, Perl
It makes perfect sense to standardize on both. Scripting languages will always be more appropriate for text processing and other tasks like validation and system administration.
But, from what I've seen, it is important to standardize an organization on one of each. Letting people go off and just write System X in new technology Y might be enjoyable, but it does end up in a great deal of duplication and expense. For example, one environment I've seen has a great deal of Actionscript, a great deal or Ruby, more Perl than I'd ever want to see, and some J2EE applications. This usually occurs when an organization lacks a sufficient level of oversight over architectural decisions.
Just pray that neither side wins. Writing only Java is as silly as writing in a different language every single day.
Standardize on Hindi~ (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Standardize on Hindi~ (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Standardize on Hindi~ (Score:3, Funny)
Sorry. No really.
Re:Standardize on Hindi~ (Score:3, Interesting)
In time you will realize what is really at stake...and it's not Java or not Java.
I saw this personally. I was working at a very large US telco, which had bought many smaller telcos in a short period of time, all using mainframes really. The old timers managed to make all work together nicely, cobol, fortran, c, whatever, it worked.
First, they "standardized" on Java, and one and a half seconds later, they "standardized" on I
A common language is good... (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course we actually do use several languages: perl, SQL, DHTML. But each one covers a very specific, non-overlapping domain. I've tried to stay away from having a second language cover the same need in a different way. It's hard enough to keep everything understood and shared as is.
Cheers.
Mixed results (Score:3, Interesting)
I've had mixed results with standardizing on a language. All too often it's done purely for the sake of standardizing, with no thought to anything else. Programming languages are tools, and ones being used by a team not just one person. You want to minimize the number of variations in your tools so people don't have to worry about needless vagaries from one tool to another. At the same time, you don't want to standardize so far that you eliminate entire kinds of tools and end up doing the equivalent of trying to use a rock as a hammer because your shop's standardized on screwdrivers and screws for holding things together and so doesn't have hammers (the programming equivalent would be trying to do simple scripting jobs, that'd be 5 lines in Perl or bash, in C++ because that's the language your shop standardized on).
The only times I've seen standardizing languages work is when the first step was to not standardize. The first step in a successful standardization effort will be to ignore languages and instead take stock of what kinds of programs you need to write. Include all those little one-off jobs that you have to do several of every week, eg. the little hack to extract the error messages you're interested in from the logfile. Then, for each kind of program, look at the languages suited to writing that kind of program and see what one your developers are most comfortable with and, just as importantly, what your existing code is written in. An inferior langauge that all your developers know well is superior to a superior language that they're not familiar with, and if you've a large body of code in one language then that language is better than a different language. If several kinds of programs can be served sufficiently well by one language, well and good. If not, well and good too. The goal is to simplify getting the job done, not hamstring yourself with rules not related to getting the job done.
In the Unix world, normally I expect at least 4 standard languages. You'll have shell script (typically sh because so many other tools expect it, but csh is possible), make (because every development environment typically depends on make at some point), another scripting language (Perl, Python, Ruby, etc.) and a "real" programming language (commonly C, C++ or Java, add VB and C# in a Windows environment, others are possible).
This is what Architects or Team Leads are for (Score:3, Interesting)
There should be a chief, and he should listen to the opinions of the entire team. Then, using his expertise, wisdom and the input of the team, he/she should make the decision.
In fact, a good architect or lead should have a good instinct for this... it will be highly dependent upon the system architecture, team makeup, etc. If the pieces are easily seperable (say, a c# GUI app that communicates to a ruby-on-rails web service), and most developers on the team know both languages, maybe multiple languages work. On the other hand, if only one or two programmers know ruby (or c#), or you're talking about one app that uses both languages, the situation gets murkier.
I've served as a lead dev / manager for teams in both scenarios. In the past, I developed a large system based on Delphi combined with C++ (several applications), and recently a whole system with C# (again, multiple applications and components). I can say that both are doable, but each was approach was tailored to the requirements of the system.
Libraries - not languages (Score:5, Insightful)
I would hazard a guess that most people want to get a problem solved in the most painless manner possible when programming.
Surely the best way to achive this is by avoiding the reinvention of the wheel.
In some manner I tend to view languages now as nothing more than the glue that binds library calls together!
My approach is:
For example, there is a wealth of scientific code out there in F77. Just because F77 is old doesn't mean that the libraries are now wrong. They still do what they did back then. They are still useful. People have spent a great deal of time working out the error propagation in these codes, the efficiency and their validity. Do you really think you will save yourself time and do a better job by rewriting it in Java? No! So. Use them.
Then there are (great) libraries such as ATLAS or FFTW [*] written in C. Why assume you can do better? You can't, use that too.
In the rare case where you need to have something written from scratch, write it in whatever you are comfortable with. In my case C++/Boost (yes another library).
Finally you need to tie all this together, and hack around with it, and analyse the results so what's wrong with a bit of Python and MATLAB?
Perhaps this is an extreme example, and doesn't fall into the buisiness relm but the point is "the path of least resistance". Sometimes that path is dictated by existing code.
Do you really expect someone to rewrite from scratch an XML parser in "DoomJuice", or whatever is fashionable in house, just to please the people that want to standerdise on "DoomJuice"? No, use an existing library!
Ok, I've made my point. I will stop now.
[*] Yes I know FFTW technically uses Objective CAML to generate C code, but that's really only a distinction that a nerd would make.
Using one language for all (Score:3, Insightful)
Every generation has had it's favourite language, and the big ones has been Cobol, Basic and C in history. Currently the languages Java and C# is rising, and offers flexibility that can be used and abused but in the end are far much more flexible than the early languages. Ada can be defined as a father of Java and C#, and certainly has it's place.
What you actually should focus more on is not a specific language, but how to model solutions and do efficient coding models. It doesn't matter what language you use if you aren't able to do a good system design. And system design is not something only for senior system analysts to do - even junior programmers should be involved. Start with a large meeting whith a HUGE whiteboard and a lot of pens in different colors - try ideas - even ideas that may seem stupid and explain WHY it's stupid. Break down into task groups and let each group do it's own analysis. This should be repeated through various phases in the project to be able to stay on track. A system isn't better as it's overall design - even if it incorporates solutions that are outright brilliant.
Building a system is like building a house - you use different material for different parts. The foundation the house resides on is the operating system. Utilities like electricity, gas, water and sewer are all connected at foundation level, which can be seen as C code (and optionally assembly code) and are normally part of the language you use unless you have special features. The basement is done with the basic language classes of Ada, Java or C#. As is the framework of the rest of the house. The walls are then done by extended classes of your language of choice and then all trimming, wallpapers etc. are your completely custom-built classes. There is need for different class groups in different rooms - like a kitchen and a bedroom does have different properties - so only a few properties are common, and you may even be able to accept that they don't even share these properties in an abstract base class since that may require too much interoperating time between different task forces. It all comes down to how big your project is. The re-inventing of the wheel can't be avoided every time, and if the wheel costs five minutes to invent - is it worth the time to check if it is already invented?
Hmm, web development anybody? (Score:4, Insightful)
Next, if you create an end-user application of some kind, in many many cases, you must use C/C++ due to end user requirements. Some of this is being eaten up by C#, but not everybody is willing to target the
If you're company is big enough to be worrying about this kind of problem, you'll have an IT infrastructure of some importance. Your IT team damn well better be using Bash scripting, Perl, Python, or some other Sys Admin language. Even Windows admins these days write scripts; there's even this new scripting framework scheduled (as an add on?) for Vista. How about your Apache config files? Your various mail/proxy/firewall configs (talking to UNIX folks here...)?
If you have a real IT division, I'll bet you have an accounting section. Remember why people have such trouble moving to OpenOffice.org? That's right, custom Excell/Acess solutions. What's that, VBScript you say? Moving into Fortune 1000 territory, how about R3? Well, that SAP system never actually did anything, but those consultants sure made a helluva lot of money. Manufacturing and assembly lines use all kinds of weird stuff. Got any telephony solutions running around? Are you targetting mobile devices? Use scientific/mathematical software? Rendering software? Various pre-press systems? Work in the medical/health care industry? A lawyer's office? All these verticals have lots of custom things running around that you sometimes can't avoid.
So in a nutshell, any reasonable corporation doing software development *should* be using 5-10 languages. If you were to pick only 1 language, the only choice you could possibly have is HTML. You could theoretically write a static HTML page with no CSS, no Javascript, no server side scripting, no SQL, and no Flash. You could run it off of one server, with no admins and no scripting. With no product to hawk, you don't need an accounting deptartment, and voila. Good luck with the whole money thing, though... What a stupid question. Use what you have to based on the requirements, and when you have a choice, do your best (maybe even bend over backwards) to avoid unnecessary proliferation.
One Standard Language (Score:3, Insightful)
The Danger in Corporate Language Standardization (Score:4, Insightful)
Nonsense such as COBOL in the desktop environment, or perl in an IBM mainframe environment. Neither makes much sense, as the supporting codebases that might make COBOL in an IBM mainframe environment do not exist in a desktop environment (without extensive (and expensive) porting) and similarly, the large pre-existing codebases for perl do not exist (or again require substantial porting) in the mainframe environment, not to mention perl's targeted UI of a unix shell or console is not what one is presented with in mainframe environments. REXX makes for a much better choice of a scripting language on the mainframe.
Yes, you CAN use COBOL for everything. Or Java. Or C/C++. Or perl. Or assembler.
That old saying, "To the man with only a hammer in the toolbox, every problem looks like a nail", applies here.
Having a toolbox with a reasonable assortment of versatile tools is a sign of a craftsman. Having a toolbox with every tool known is a sign of a rich dilettante playing at being a craftsman. Having a toolbox containing a single tool is a sign of an idiot playing at being a craftsman.
Its a simple debate (Score:3, Insightful)
And I would say "and C hardly makes sense when you want a scriptable telemetry data simulator". So we use at least two languages here as long as you dont count the cases where we use C# for win32 gui's, java for some corba interfacing stuff, VB for program/device monitoring (on win32), etc.
There is no 'silver bullet' language so why would you force yourself into treating one like it was? Any time you might have saved by not having to learn a new language will be eaten alive by the time spent trying to shoehorn a problem into a your chosen languages paradigm.
Really, all languages suck, some less than others, but its really contextual.
To really break the arguemtn you might say something like "When we standardize on a language we will also standardize on the types of problems we can address competitivly".
At least thats the way I figure it.
Re:Ada (Score:2, Funny)
Re: Ada (Score:4, Interesting)
That was a popular critique 20 years ago, but these days people tend to criticize it in the opposite direction (i.e. no standard class library).
> The problem with this large programming language is that it is so complex that most programmers can't know all of it, and they only use a part of it. That, in turn, becomes a problem whe two sequential developers on the same piece of code know different parts of the language, and the second developer can't read the first developer's code.
I don't think that's correct. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know every obscure feature, but then I don't use it professionally either.
> It also produces a few problems in trying to build a correct, compliant compiler
I have heard that that was true when the spec was first published a generation ago, but any such problems have long since been solved.
> So the point here is that "standardizing on one language" has been tried before, and it was a huge flop.
But a political flop rather than a technical flop. By the time the DoD was ready to start using it everyone wanted to program in C++, and the administrators were giving out waivers like Halloween candy.
Also (as often seen by people's ill-informed comments about it on Slashdot (no, I'm not referring to your post)), Ada has an unjustified bad reputation based on ignorance, such as the oft-encountered claim that the first Arianne 5 [wikipedia.org] rocket crashed due to a problem with Ada, and oft-encountered quotes from Hoare (saw it as a Slashdot cookie earlier today, as a matter of fact) that was actually a critique of an early draft of the language. Much of Hoare's critique was addressed in the final project, and of course we've had the '95 spec since then. (And an 0? update coming out RSN.)
People who actually use it tend to have a high opinion of it. I use it by choice for my hobby projects.
Also, the switch from complaints about it being "too big" a generation ago to being "too little" now show just how fickle out notions of what a language 'ought' to be like actually are.
Re:Ada (Score:3, Informative)
C is an appropriate language for systems programming, and for high performance/small footprint applications where every last byte of memory and cycle of compute matters.
Statically type-safe languages like Java, C#, ML, and Haskall, are appropriate where space and time are less tight, but correctness matters. Like, it would be nice if your desktop applicatio
Re:It's been tried (Score:3, Informative)