Current mood:

annoyed

The Paradox of (Programming Language) Choice
One of the slides Avi Bryant showed during his RailsConf talk bragged that Smalltalk had multiple commercial vendors.

Is that something to brag about? Frankly, I think it's one of the reasons (of several) that Smalltalk will never regain significant traction, assuming it ever really had any. Consider this thread where you've got Smalltalkers going after each other about incompatibility issues between different versions of Smalltalk.

Think about that for a moment. Now put yourself in the shoes of a PM who's trying to decide *which* version of Smalltalk to use. There are what, 12 versions of Smalltalk out there, each with various features? Forgetting for the moment that all but one are not free. And nothing but a bunch of Smalltalk programmers, each with their favorite flavor, to help you decide.

How does this scenario help a language in the long run?

It doesn't. The paradox of choice ends up working against it. It becomes marginalized. The PM opts for another language that only has one (primary) implementation. And probably a free one to boot.

Ruby is in a precarious position at the moment in this regard. Right now we've got MRI Ruby, JRuby and IronRuby. Life is good because the latter two can solve deficiencies in the language that will make them better than MRI Ruby. Also, IronRuby will be targeted at a specific platform, so the choices now are easy.

But that may not last.

What happens when Ruby 2.0, JRuby, IronRuby, etc, all reach production worthiness?

Now put yourself in the shoes of a PM...