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Why Do Some Programming Languages Live and Others Die?

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

#21

Post by protomyth »

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…

The Java infrastructure one of its great strengths. I really do believe the way it evolved into something that System Admins and (to a lesser extent) DBAs could live with did it quite a lot of good in adoption. I really do believe it was independent of the actual language syntax.

these type of things: I put the war and the server and run some scripts. I deploy more app servers.

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

#22

Post by supersillyus »

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…

Does the answer here make sense to you?: http://golang.org/doc/go_faq.html#creating_a_new_language

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

#23

Post by wonderzombie »

This reminds me of an earlier piece, the one about VB. Merit of a given PL and its success/popularity are correlated, surely, but it's more complex than that. They can be orthogonal by varying degrees, I'd say.

What they really seem to be asking is why hasn't a language which has improved substantially on C received similar adoption. Possibly another qualifier is that the language mustn't be C-like. Or there's an implicit value judgment about Java in there. :)

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

#24

Post by sanderjd »

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.

Could you elaborate? Go feels nothing like Java to me.

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

#25

Post by neonscribe »

This subject has been covered extensively, but rarely in the popular press. One correction: C wasn't "popularized" in 1977. It was available inside Bell Labs and in a few C.S. departments on early PDP-11 Unix versions, but it did not really become popular until the late 1980s, when it became a viable choice for development on MS-DOS and Windows (with some ugly extensions to handle 16-bit address segments).

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

#26

Post by ralphc »

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…

Having lived through it, the problem that Java uniquely solved in the '90s was that software companiesn had fallen in love with OO but C++ was too complicated for developers to use safely, with pointers vs. references problems, operator overloading (IIRC, the Zapp framework overloaded ++ to add items to a menu), and lack of garbage collection. Java was a breath of fresh air, a language sweet spot with most of C++'s power and few of its drawbacks.

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

#27

Post by spullara »

mccoyst wrote: post #16
spullara wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just because they solve the same problems differently, doesn't mean they don't solve the same problems.
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