Beyond Java - Bruce Tate [47]
When I stepped away from Java for the first time, I needed an economic mother bird to nudge me out of the nest. Java's just too safe and too comfortable otherwise. Recall that as I write this book, I am calling the shots for a start-up. We're writing a Java application to help engineers configure equipment that measures safety systems in manufacturing plants. I recommended moving the application from Java to Ruby midstream because I found the difference in productivity between the environments too great to ignore. Further, when all was said and done, the new application was easier to maintain with fewer lines of code, it was fast enough, easier to tune, and easier to extend with security. I'd estimate that we're three to five times more productive in Ruby. Certainly, Ruby is not the only language that's more productive than Java, but it's an interesting test case. You'll see more in Chapter 7. Productivity will be the economic catalyst that begins to chip away from the Java base. Productivity will drive the emergence of the next great language.
Approachability
When you look at early adoption for all major successful languages, one of the key issues is approachability. New languages need to grab new users quickly. You should be able to get started quickly, and solve a problem that's important to you immediately. C was approachable because it let hard-core systems programmers solve low-level problems in a high-level language, with much better performance and flexibility than other high-level languages. C++ was approachable because you could write C without modifications, and upgrade to C++ features as you wanted to include them in your programs. Java was approachable because it had a familiar syntax, a friendlier memory model, and a clear, consistent path to Internet solutions. Smalltalk was not approachable, because vendors charged too much—it was too expensive to play.
Though nothing simple has a C++-like syntax, I still think that many languages are approachable because of their friendly, productive syntax with a familiar object model. Python versus Ruby is a good example of differences in approachability. Ruby has one of the most highly productive web environments, and a community and philosophy focused on getting programmers off of the ground quickly and painlessly. You can install components easily, often with two or three words, using a feature called Gems that does the work for you, provided you have an Internet connection. Python, on the other hand, has a simple language and syntax, but the web libraries are nowhere near as approachable. When you start to learn one of them, you don't find the ready tutorials or community reaching out to help you. The Ruby on Rails people understand how to make Rails approachable.
The Killer App
Without some kind of catalyst, it's difficult to imagine how a successful community ever gets started. Applets let Java spread to many desktops quickly. Developers could embed dynamic content into their web pages in a matter of hours.
On the surface, it seems like a language must have a vibrant community to ever get rich enough to succeed on any scale, but the community usually won't come until the language is rich enough. A killer app to a developer is a solution that is so compelling that it transcends language. It alone can rapidly drive community growth. It's not the only way a language can succeed, but it's certainly the most likely way.
The killer app is a popular notion of a catalyst. A killer app solves an important problem in such a forceful way that users are compelled migrate. Think California gold rush. People often point to the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet as the killer app that moved businesspeople to Microsoft Windows. Meanwhile, the killer app for OS/2 never came. For Java, you could easily argue that Netscape made it all possible by putting Java on the desktop of millions of potential developers. Applets, or the idea of deploying applications in a browser, also played a significant role, and it's that concept that morphed into servlets and server-side