Why Do Some Programming Languages Live and Others Die? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Do Some Programming Languages Live and Others Die?

#11

Post by ChuckMcM » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 8:58 PM UTC

npalli wrote: post #8

ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

The key take away from this: "Part of the problem, he says, is that language designers don’t always have practical objectives. “There’s a tendency in academics of trying to solve a problem when no one actually ever had that problem,” said Rabkin, who recently received his computer science PhD at Berkeley and is now at Princeton working on a post-doc. " I was at Google when Go was birthing (not part of the project or…

How do you explain Java's massive uptake. It can't be it that it solved some problem uniquely that no other language did (whatever that was in 1995). Without the massive marketing and development by Sun, IBM and Oracle who wanted to use it to undermine the windows platform I doubt Java would have taken off the manner it has. Same thing with C and C++. Without AT&T's backing of Unix and C it is highly unlikely C would…

Java set out to solve two problems, one was portability of 'compiled' code, so OS/ISA independence, and the other was security issues. And Sun was actually in the process of flushing it down the toilet prior to the response it got in Darmdstadt and elsewhere. The big marketing push came when Sun saw it as a way to club Microsoft, that occurred only after people figured that 'life in the browser' didn't care what OS you ran on. And a lot of people wanted to get out from under Microsoft's thumb at the time.

"It seems that solving some problem might be optional, but commerical backing and long term support is essential."

It seems Forth might be a counter example here, what are your thoughts on its relative success?

Re: Why Do Some Programming Languages Live and Others Die?

#12

Post by spullara » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 9:01 PM UTC

mccoyst wrote: post #7

ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

The key take away from this: "Part of the problem, he says, is that language designers don’t always have practical objectives. “There’s a tendency in academics of trying to solve a problem when no one actually ever had that problem,” said Rabkin, who recently received his computer science PhD at Berkeley and is now at Princeton working on a post-doc. " I was at Google when Go was birthing (not part of the project or…

Go solves almost all of the problems that C introduces, how's that sound?

Those problems were solved by Java over a decade ago in a nearly identical way.

Re: Why Do Some Programming Languages Live and Others Die?

#13

Post by ChuckMcM » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 9:01 PM UTC

mccoyst wrote: post #7

ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

The key take away from this: "Part of the problem, he says, is that language designers don’t always have practical objectives. “There’s a tendency in academics of trying to solve a problem when no one actually ever had that problem,” said Rabkin, who recently received his computer science PhD at Berkeley and is now at Princeton working on a post-doc. " I was at Google when Go was birthing (not part of the project or…

Go solves almost all of the problems that C introduces, how's that sound?

Circular :-) But more constructively, it helps if you can get a bit deeper in the analysis. So C has a memory management problem, solved or not solved? C has a concurrency problem, solved or not solved? C has a security problem, solved or not solved? I will be the first to admit that I've not kept up with it since I left so it is entirely possible it's found its voice, has it?

Re: Why Do Some Programming Languages Live and Others Die?

#14

Post by ChuckMcM » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 9:03 PM UTC

6ren wrote: post #10

ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

The key take away from this: "Part of the problem, he says, is that language designers don’t always have practical objectives. “There’s a tendency in academics of trying to solve a problem when no one actually ever had that problem,” said Rabkin, who recently received his computer science PhD at Berkeley and is now at Princeton working on a post-doc. " I was at Google when Go was birthing (not part of the project or…

It's an instance of market adoption of a product, being a solution to an urgent problem helps. Many programming languages are scripting languages of a platform, and it's the platform that solves the problem. In general it's subject to all the vagrancies of marketing, especially whether it gets publicized/promoted/pushed. If there are competing products, and both do the same job well, probably one will win (e.g. pytho…

See below, but specifically to your enterprise comment, by creating an OS independent abstraction environment Java code could cross boundaries of folks equipment and the security policies insured that offering up programmability didn't mean giving away the farm. That was a need the enterprise providers had had for a long time (and one that Rexx was also targeting btw)

Re: Why Do Some Programming Languages Live and Others Die?

#15

Post by mccoyst » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 9:04 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #11

npalli wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you explain Java's massive uptake. It can't be it that it solved some problem uniquely that no other language did (whatever that was in 1995). Without the massive marketing and development by Sun, IBM and Oracle who wanted to use it to undermine the windows platform I doubt Java would have taken off the manner it has. Same thing with C and C++. Without AT&T's backing of Unix and C it is highly unlikely C would…

Java set out to solve two problems, one was portability of 'compiled' code, so OS/ISA independence, and the other was security issues. And Sun was actually in the process of flushing it down the toilet prior to the response it got in Darmdstadt and elsewhere. The big marketing push came when Sun saw it as a way to club Microsoft, that occurred only after people figured that 'life in the browser' didn't care what OS y…

Very few people/projects use Forth…

But, I can think of one or two way more popular and significant counterexamples (although I don't disagree with his general sentiment): Perl and Ruby.

Re: Why Do Some Programming Languages Live and Others Die?

#16

Post by mccoyst » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 9:10 PM UTC

spullara wrote: post #12

mccoyst wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go solves almost all of the problems that C introduces, how's that sound?

Those problems were solved by Java over a decade ago in a nearly identical way.

Either you don't know Java or you don't know Go, because the way the two do things almost couldn't be more different. The JVM and the requirement that every non-primitive be a class that inherits from Object are not small differences.

Re: Why Do Some Programming Languages Live and Others Die?

#17

Post by mccoyst » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 9:20 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #13

mccoyst wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go solves almost all of the problems that C introduces, how's that sound?

Circular :-) But more constructively, it helps if you can get a bit deeper in the analysis. So C has a memory management problem, solved or not solved? C has a concurrency problem, solved or not solved? C has a security problem, solved or not solved? I will be the first to admit that I've not kept up with it since I left so it is entirely possible it's found its voice, has it?

I do mean almost everything; C has many problems: The preprocessor, no modules, annoying to correctly and portably write even seemingly simple things like signed integer calculations, error handling, resource management, almost anything involving arrays is a pain. I could go on, if I were in a worse mood. Go solve all of those for me, keeping the same clean feeling of C, yet is actually clean and simpler.

Re: Why Do Some Programming Languages Live and Others Die?

#18

Post by cldrope » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 9:23 PM UTC

spullara wrote: post #12

mccoyst wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go solves almost all of the problems that C introduces, how's that sound?

Those problems were solved by Java over a decade ago in a nearly identical way.

I love Java but it did introduce us (which may have occurred naturally over time) to new subsets of problems, which may in the future as well be referred to as traits.

Re: Why Do Some Programming Languages Live and Others Die?

#19

Post by cpeterso » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 9:42 PM UTC

mccoyst wrote: post #7

ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

The key take away from this: "Part of the problem, he says, is that language designers don’t always have practical objectives. “There’s a tendency in academics of trying to solve a problem when no one actually ever had that problem,” said Rabkin, who recently received his computer science PhD at Berkeley and is now at Princeton working on a post-doc. " I was at Google when Go was birthing (not part of the project or…

Go solves almost all of the problems that C introduces, how's that sound?

But Go was not created in a vacuum. Many other languages have solved C's problems since then.

Re: Why Do Some Programming Languages Live and Others Die?

#20

Post by mjwalshe » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 9:42 PM UTC

npalli wrote: post #8

ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

The key take away from this: "Part of the problem, he says, is that language designers don’t always have practical objectives. “There’s a tendency in academics of trying to solve a problem when no one actually ever had that problem,” said Rabkin, who recently received his computer science PhD at Berkeley and is now at Princeton working on a post-doc. " I was at Google when Go was birthing (not part of the project or…

How do you explain Java's massive uptake. It can't be it that it solved some problem uniquely that no other language did (whatever that was in 1995). Without the massive marketing and development by Sun, IBM and Oracle who wanted to use it to undermine the windows platform I doubt Java would have taken off the manner it has. Same thing with C and C++. Without AT&T's backing of Unix and C it is highly unlikely C would…

well FORTRAN was designed for technical programming so its not just IBM's muscle.