Very well written email message from Geoff Teale on the golang mailing list on programmers and progamming languages (thread).
To summarise a long presentation I gave to non-programmers:
- There are 12 million programmers in the world
- The majority of those programmers are scarcely qualified
- Most technology decisions are made by a combination of following the crowd and a false understanding of risk.
- The high cost and failure rate in software development is no coincidence.
Remember the Stevie Wonder rule - “When you believe in something you don’t understand then you suffer”. In this case that means “Perhaps making programming language decisions based on what 12 million powerless idiots are doing isn’t the golden road to glory and great hacks.”