> if that were universally true, one could out-compete the entrenched software companies
What makes a software product a successful product? Would you agree that popularity and sold copies do not necessarily make it the right product? There's a lot of marketing goes into success, and I admit - sound engineering often lacks good marketing.
What you can't see behind your clouded judgment that despite being non-mainstream tech, Clojure (I can only speak for Clojure since that's my primary language, I've been using for the past few years) has been quite successful.
- It is consistently being rated as the top paid language (alongside with F#) in numerous surveys (e.g., Stackoverflow and StateOfJS)
- The community has fewer active members than the number of programmers working for Google, but they are continually innovating. They are figuring out interop with Python and R, writing machine learning libraries and books about it, they are running Clojure-like Lisp dialect on BEAM, Clojure-like Lisp that compiles to Lua, researching type-systems, running Clojure on embedded devices, etc.
- Clojure teams at companies like Walmart and Apple processing massive amounts of data. Can you imagine the amount of data Walmart has to deal with on Black Fridays? Do you know how many people they have in the team that has built the pipeline for processing receipts? Seven. For comparison, React team at Facebook has more developers, and they also get massive help from it being open-source. I don't want to belittle the work they do; managing a massively popular UI library is not a simple task either. I just brought it here for the lack of better examples.
- Jira, incredibly popular and sometimes vehemently hated by programmers. Please take a look at its less popular competitive Clubhouse.io. It's beautiful, clean, and nothing but a fantastic product. I believe they've built it with a team of fewer than ten developers. And there are many examples like that: CircleCI, Grammarly, Pandora and many, many more.
I agree with what you say:
> The "best" programmers are often those who have a decent understanding of the domain, UI design, and various "team" skills.
That's why (after many years programming in other languages) I chose Clojure. It allows me to stay laser-focused on solving real problems. Like creator of Clojure once said: "solve real-world problems, not puzzles."
> Clojure teams at companies like Walmart and Apple processing massive amounts of data.
Yes, I already agreed it does well in certain niches. Usually in query-esque niches. SQL is also functional-esque for similar reasons.
You seem to be contradicting yourself, saying that other factors overwhelm FP's alleged programmer productivity gains, yet point out niches where it does well and is common. It spreads there, but not elsewhere.
> top paid language
I'll leave salary discussion to
lispm's (user) reply thread.
> There's a lot of marketing goes into success, and I admit - sound engineering often lacks good marketing.
Yes, but that's mostly independent of programming productivity. It's not a difference maker in comparisons. Just because programming isn't everything to the bottom line doesn't mean it's nothing to it. For a software shop, programming is still a notable portion of activities that affect the bottom line. If you are 1% more profitable than your competitors, that difference will compound over time. If you grow 4% a year but your competitor grows just 3% a year, you'll eventually swamp them. Do a spreadsheet on it if you don't believe me.
I was going to make a similar comment. Programmer salary and owner profits are not necessarily related. The more specialized a skill is, the more it pays in general. (From the worker's standpoint this is a mixed bag in that you get more money if you are employed, but may have less geographical choice.)
What makes a software product a successful product? Would you agree that popularity and sold copies do not necessarily make it the right product? There's a lot of marketing goes into success, and I admit - sound engineering often lacks good marketing.
What you can't see behind your clouded judgment that despite being non-mainstream tech, Clojure (I can only speak for Clojure since that's my primary language, I've been using for the past few years) has been quite successful.
- It is consistently being rated as the top paid language (alongside with F#) in numerous surveys (e.g., Stackoverflow and StateOfJS)
- The community has fewer active members than the number of programmers working for Google, but they are continually innovating. They are figuring out interop with Python and R, writing machine learning libraries and books about it, they are running Clojure-like Lisp dialect on BEAM, Clojure-like Lisp that compiles to Lua, researching type-systems, running Clojure on embedded devices, etc.
- Clojure teams at companies like Walmart and Apple processing massive amounts of data. Can you imagine the amount of data Walmart has to deal with on Black Fridays? Do you know how many people they have in the team that has built the pipeline for processing receipts? Seven. For comparison, React team at Facebook has more developers, and they also get massive help from it being open-source. I don't want to belittle the work they do; managing a massively popular UI library is not a simple task either. I just brought it here for the lack of better examples.
- Jira, incredibly popular and sometimes vehemently hated by programmers. Please take a look at its less popular competitive Clubhouse.io. It's beautiful, clean, and nothing but a fantastic product. I believe they've built it with a team of fewer than ten developers. And there are many examples like that: CircleCI, Grammarly, Pandora and many, many more.
I agree with what you say:
> The "best" programmers are often those who have a decent understanding of the domain, UI design, and various "team" skills.
That's why (after many years programming in other languages) I chose Clojure. It allows me to stay laser-focused on solving real problems. Like creator of Clojure once said: "solve real-world problems, not puzzles."