nobodyuses.org

Computing has turned into pop culture

Alan Kay, 2011 (Programming and Scaling)

[Programming]'s a fashion industry. Trends come; trends go. The lack of historical awareness is considered by most to be a feature.

Baldur Bjarnason, 2022 (Programming is a Pop Culture)

Over and over I hear remarks like "Ruby is dead" or "nobody really uses C anymore" even in the comment section of GitHub, a massive Ruby on Rails website, for projects managed by Git, a mostly-C CLI.

The greater computing industry has little sense of history, even when the history is as recent as right now!. We operate as a pop culture and are particularly influenced by recency bias. This can be excused in an industry where we build on hardware that has seen decades of sustained exponential growth. (See: Moore's Law) But as unavoidable as it may be, we also benefit from keeping the record straight!

Also, it's not just the old technologies that get overlooked. Newcomers, underdogs, and outcasts also have their impact overlooked. Odin, R, Prolog, Ada, and many others also are used in ways that surprise many.

This is a website intended to catalog the most notable uses of any given programming language, framework, or other technology.

And remember kids, just because everyone uses Spring (or React, or whatever) it doesn't mean it's the best tool for the job. These massive communities tend to draw in a lot of documentation and examples, but the quality range tends to expand with the size of a community. Just because something is chosen less or discussed less doesn't mean it's worse.

Learn, teach, and make things you can be proud of.

Related sites and sources:

• Built With
• TIOBE Index