Threshold of entry into the language. Less is better?

Question

Programming languages

Hello. I would like to hear the opinion of the habra community about the subject.
Now it is interesting for me to evaluate the situation precisely by the threshold of entry, and not by any other characteristics of a particular language.

On the one hand, if a language has a low entry threshold, then this contributes to its spread and, accordingly, development. But on the other hand, incompetent people may appear among developers (perhaps due to lack of experience), who will also write articles, respond to forums, etc. And this may lead to a decrease in the reputation of the language and the outflow of specialists to other technologies.

How, in your opinion, has the entry threshold affected modern c++/java/c#/python/ruby/php/... languages?

Answer 1

The mass of incompetent people is affected not so much by the threshold of entry as by the popularity of the language. Thus, php has a lot of incompetence more than python, despite the fact that python has a lower entry threshold.
PS These are all guesses, not studies read somewhere.

Answer 2

Here, having specified the question “What is better for the development and reputation of the language,” you can already try to answer.
The answer is "No."
For all this, a combination of many factors is needed, and the threshold of entry is not at all one of them. (I really think that the concept of “entry threshold” is generally an invention, and the threshold itself depends only on the quality of the literature.)
For example, the entry threshold into QBasic is minimal, but how much is written on it now? Is he developing? Are there many communities?
If the language performs the tasks assigned to it, and does it not through (_!_), then it will develop no matter what.

Answer 3

The entry threshold can play at least some tangible role only in cases where it really differs significantly, for example, as if comparing Assembler and PHP.
And for the mainstream languages ​​you mentioned above, the entry threshold is approximately the same: Show me at least one C / C ++ programmer who would say that he could never master, for example, php or python? For mainstream languages, the extent to which language tools cover certain ranges of tasks
has a greater impact . I deliberately said not languages ​​as such, but language means.(the language and everything that comes with it), because I mean the whole set that the language drags along with it: the language itself, the runtime environment, standard and non-standard libraries, the development environment, the documentation that comes with the language or is googled separately, as well as the presence of a successful -unsuccessful experience of using these language tools in specific tasks in the market.

Answer 4

PHP has become the de facto standard for building web applications due to its low barrier to entry. Python gained a lot of popularity, although Perl appeared three years earlier. But keep in mind that this is far from being the only criterion for a JP.