RedMonk

RedMonk - http://redmonk.com/jobs - Remote or Portland, ME or London, UK

Analyst

## Who is RedMonk

We're the analyst firm that thinks developers are the most important constituency in technology. Our work shows up here on HN from time to time.

## What You Need to Have

- A rational, fact-based based approach. Opinions are fine. Data is better.

- The ability to synthesize disparate data from different sources, both quantitative and qualitative.

- Excellent communication skills, and ideally experience presenting.

- The ability to write clear, digestible and insightful analysis of complex technology – and not take months to do it.

- A reasonable online presence. You don’t need to be Taylor Swift, but if you don’t know what Twitter is there’s a problem.

- Deep and relevant technical expertise in technology infrastructure.

- A personality that both we and our clients enjoy working with. You can call this the no assholes rule.

- The ability to travel regularly to industry events and client sites.
- A passion for developers.

## It’d Be Nice If You Had

- A background in statistics, economics or both.

- Exposure to/training with statistical programming languages (R or Python if you must).

- Experience as a developer, whether as a hobby or profession.

- A broad range of technology exposure (as opposed to being
expert in a tiny niche).

- Familiarity with media creation and editing; audio, video or both.

- An affinity for craft beer.

To apply for the position, please…

Most developers are hesitant to accept new programming paradigms, so it takes a very long time to change how people write code (something Brett Victor captured brilliantly in his talk, The Future of Programming [1]). Therefore, I can't really say if "ten years from now" is the right time frame or if it's more like thirty years.

That said, I think it's safe to say that static typing is "winning" if it ends up being used in almost every single one of the top 10 programming languages. By "used", I mean it's used in the vast majority of the core language libraries and by most major companies that depend on the language. Depending on which popularity chart you want to believe (e.g. langpop [2], TIOBE [3], or RedMonk [4]), the top 10 languages are roughly the various flavors of C (C, C++, C#, Objective C), Java, PHP, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Perl, and Shell. With the exception of Perl (which will not be in the top 10 for much longer) and Shell (which will probably be in use for a long time), all of those are already statically typed or moving towards it.

I think a similar metric could apply to functional programming: if the top 10 languages use functional programming in the vast majority of the core libraries and by most major companies, then it has "won". This will likely take longer than static typing, but if companies keep adopting languages like Scala and Clojure, they may crack the top 10 some day.

Of course, it's worth mentioning that what's really "winning" right now is…

Two comments about the submission:

First:

The author, katamari64.se, is clearly an incompetent, dishonest, manipulative wretch, deeply similar to some of the wretches he criticizes. And there is absolutely no good reason for the article being as long as it is. The article also is full of completely obvious errors, like footnotes being broken, indicating that it might have been partially or fully generated without review.

Second:

For whatever reason, the article fails to question this claim:

> Wonderfully, Odin is now being used by dozens of companies, thousands of public projects, and over a million hobbyists

Specifically, the "million hobbyists". That number is not sourced and is likely utterly false. The claim about thousands of public projects might be true, judging by https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=language:Odin , but many of those repositories are for tiny projects that have not been updated for a long time, or have even been archived. Redmonk does not even seem to list Odin: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2026/04/14/language-rankings-1-26/ . I don't care too much about Odin having a Wikipedia entry or not, but some of the more important claims in favor of Odin's notability are potentially utterly false, yet this article doesn't even address them despite its utterly and unnecessarily bloated length.

To summarize:

The article, its author, and Wikipedia, are, at best, trash.

It is fine that the Wikipedia article was removed, it would also have been…

> Companies and business leaders don’t care if jobs are hard or annoying or take longer than they “should”. The difference between a user story taking a day or 3 days is negligible compared to its business value. Companies and their leaders care about revenue and costs. They care about customers and growth. They care about time to market. If we want to have our non-technical colleagues listen and act, we need to either improve our use of the financial terms they understand or we need to translate our message into business outcomes that they do care about.

I confess, after many years, Im finding it pretty tiring working for businesses/people that dont have the capability to understand or assess. That we keep having people running the show who lack the faculty to understand how the meat is made, that are unfit to judge or assess the health of the company's output is wearisome.

This article is the hard truth of how to deal with the shitty situation almost everyone is in- us human resources, being tooled & wielded by a far off, distant, & unknowing managerial class. This article is great real talk, for techies.

But the absurdity & dissonance is not discussed here. The techhood are humams raised amid alien cultures, alien civilizations, dropped into even more particularly multi-alien kmany genrations of aliens) worlds/living systems. We are demanded of, commanded, directed by people unseeing, incapable of assessing. Even if they saw the sausage being made they'd have no…

> Avoid CoffeeScript. Most of its better features are now in ES6, a standard.

This argument against CoffeeScript isn't very objective.
One of CoffeeScript's best features is the minimalistic and expressive syntax.

"CoffeeScript (#6) appears dramatically more expressive than JavaScript (#51), in fact among the best of all languages."[1]

"CoffeeScript is #1 for consistency, with an IQR spread of only 23 LOC/commit compared to even #4 Clojure at 51 LOC/commit. By the time we’ve gotten to #8 Groovy, we’ve dropped to an IQR of 68 LOC/commit. In other words, CoffeeScript is incredibly consistent across domains and developers in its expressiveness."[1]

Using the author's train of thought I could state:
"Avoid Bluebird[2]. Most of its better features are now in ES6 promises, a standard."

Yes promises are in the ES6 standard, but that's not the best feature of bluebird. There were and are many promise based libraries, but bluebird was built for unmatched performance. One will use it if performance matters.

Even today it's faster than the native implementations of promises [3].

> Tooling (such as CoffeeLint) is very weak.

Maybe because, as it turns out, in CoffeeScript you don't need a lot of tooling. Why would that be a bad thing?

> Electron is the foundation of the great Atom editor and can be used to make your own applications.

Atom is written in CoffeeScript [4].

[1] http://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2013/03/25/programming-languages-ranked-by-expressiveness/

[2]…

Nearly two years have passed since the AI slop experiment with curl, which revealed the inefficiency of filtering HackerOne reports during the trial. It also exposed the simmering emotions and exhaustion of the maintainers overseeing those open-source projects. In the link, you will see that Sunday was specifically chosen for the experiment to elicit the most human responses possible.

Upon reviewing the HackerOne reports following the experiment, it was found that many remained categorized as "Not-applicable" or "Spam," including even a "Happy New Year" message from a novice hacker. It is unfortunate that such an individual had to be bluntly taught a lesson by the reality of the world.

These events demonstrate that being human does not vary in direct proportion to technological knowledge. However, one can see the clear effort by the curl team to protect their open-source project, which has a massive user base. A successful hack would result in immense damage, making their sacrifice highly commendable in my view. Yet, this attempt to protect also creates a divide between the defenders and those who cause them to waste their invaluable time.

Personally, I believe everyone's time is valuable—both the curl maintainers and the new programmers attempting to use AI to generate income, or even those with the intent to spam. Even if the spammers are devalued, with their time considered less worthy than those trying to protect the world, it still reflects our inherent…