What Makes a Programming Language Successful?

danielstoner writes "The article '13 reasons why Ruby, Python and the gang will push Java to die... of old age' makes an interesting analysis of the programming languages battling for a place in programmers' minds. What really makes a language popular? What really makes a language 'good'? What is success for a programming language? Can we say COBOL is a successful language? What about Ruby, Python, etc?"

Comments

The "un-success" of a language

[Slashdot Suxxors]

Is directly proportionate to the amount of /. posts talking down on it.

Fact.

Beards

[AioKits]

I thought it was the beards on the creator(s) of the language that determines the success?

Re:Beards

[Anonymous Coward]

GOTO BEARDS

Re:Beards

[Anonymous Coward]

I was recently talking with Bjarne Stroustrup, and I mentioned the beard thing to him. (Apparently he'd gotten several hundred Slashdot etc. related emails to the same effect, but I told him to his beardless *face*.) He appreciated the general sentiment, but it seemed to me he didn't -believe-. A bunch of us grad students in the lab have started a petition, so cross your flindas.

grmbl.

[thhamm]

What Makes a Programming Language Successful?

those who don't know how to use it.

Python's Success..

[neoform]

Python's success is based on how much python coders bash PHP. The more they attack PHP the better the language gets.

Re:Python's Success..

[missing000]

Nope it gets better. PHP sucks!

Yes, sure, it is the evil gang...

[JamesP]

that is going to kill poor Java

It is not the fact that it is overly verbose, too rigid, and is bloated as as a puffer fish on helium.

Expert@work ...

[foobsr]

TFA: "Some languages made strange mistakes. For example Python is a great language but the idea of using indentation as block demarcation really is a cannon ball chained to its feet. While most of the pythonistas defend this idea with a lot of energy, the truth is this feature makes it really a dangerous tool in big, world wide distributed projects - and most important enterprise projects are big and distributed."

Elsewhere: "Python Creator Guido van Rossum now working at Google"

Well. Now I finally know how Google is dangerous.

CC.

Re:Back to Basic

[D Ninja]

the possibility to write unreadable code Hate to break it to you, but that's a possibility in any language.

Re:Quck!

[gardyloo]

I use my own OS written in brainfuck, you insensitive clod!

Depends on what you want ...

[Anonymous Coward]

PHP - Great if you want to get web apps up FAST.
C++ - Great if you want to write OS-dependant apps.
Java - Great if you want to hire a bus-load of CS majors fresh out of university tomorrow.
C# - Great if you want to replace your old VB projects.
Perl - Great if you want to keep your job intact, as no one else will ever able able to read your code.
Python/Ruby - Great if you want to impress PHB's who buy into hype and buzz-words.

That said, the fact that Google apps runs python may see a major shift from PHP in the next few years. It's the only reason I'm starting to learn it. So far, it seems to be a cross between "Perl I can read" and "not quite Java".

(my captcha is develop ~ how apropos)

Knuth said that the most important thing is...

[dapyx]

...the name!

The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.
--Donald Knuth

My god People Know The Answer

[guysmilee]

My god People Know The Answer ... the answer is beyond simple ... and any other answer is simply BS ... 1.) Clear, simple, and familiar grammar/semantics in the core language. 2.) Simple well documented techniques for creating multiple domain specific extensions (i.e. libraries). 3.) Multi-platform compiler/interpreter support. Now stop wasting my time with this trivial crap ...

Re:Grace Hopper & John Backus didnt have

[morgan_greywolf]

They were inventors of COBOL, FORTRAN and LISP - three languages still in use from the 1950s.

Yes, only by people who either have finger worn down to stubs, have difficulty forming complete sentences, or have worn out the ( and ) keys on their keyboards.

From TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Maximum concurrency limit of 10 exceeded.Currently serving the following requests: /2008/05/10/script-thy-java-app/ /2008/05/28/13-reasons-java-die-old-age/ /2008/05/28/13-reasons-java-die-old-age/ /2008/05/28/13-reasons-java-die-old-age/ /2008/05/28/13-reasons-java-die-old-age/ /feed/atom/ /2008/05/28/13-reasons-java-die-old-age/ /favicon.ico /2008/05/28/13-reasons-java-die-old-age/ /2008/05/28/13-reasons-java-die-old-age/ /2008/05/28/13-reasons-java-die-old-age/ /2008/05/28/13-reasons-java-die-old-age/ /2008/05/28/13-reasons-java-die-old-age/

If you are the owner of this website, you may need to upgrade to a more advanced plan.

Re:Off the top of my head?

[Maljin Jolt]

I'm not even sure what Python offers over the dozens of other languages that preceded it.

I will show you. It is that lispilly haskellish funkshunional coding style available in python. Can you do it in C?

#!/usr/bin/env python
 
import sys
 
def main ():
  return reduce(lambda b,c:(lambda x:(lambda r=sys.stdout.write(chr(x)):x)())(c+b), [32,40,29,7,0,3,-67,-12,87,-8,3,-6,-8,-67,-23])
 
main()

Re:I don't really get the Java hate around here

[leighklotz]

see http://norvig.com/python-lisp.html section 10

the author looks like he is inexperienced, and unaware of the function "reduce", ... (along with map ...) Maybe you should send the author a note about map and reduce. As director of Research at Google, he's probably in a position to influence some of their programmers to make use of map and reduce.

Re:Back to Basic

[D Ninja]

John put the CD in the cabinet and then sold it.

Faulty pronoun reference. Which one am I talking about? You'll never know. (And if you pick one, I'll just say it was the other one.)

LOL perl

[Anonymous Coward]

I was on an old dial up bbs once having a fierce argument and was deep into a paragraph lambasting my foe, when a nearby thunderstorm injected about 4 lines of pure static garbage characters into my text, and the techy walked by, glanced at my screen and said "taking up perl?"

Re:Off the top of my head?

[Firehed]

return reduce(lambda b,c:(lambda x:(lambda r=sys.stdout.write(chr(x)):x)())(c+b), [32,40,29,7,0,3,-67,-12,87,-8,3,-6,-8,-67,-23])

And this is why God invented comments.

Re:From whose point of view?

[Reverend528]

Not to sound too much like Obi Wan

These are your father's parentheses. Elegant weapons, for a more... civilized age.

Re:All Programming Languages Suck

[SQLGuru]

So, basically, what you're saying here is: GET ON MY LAWN! or something like that?

a GOTO statement

[circletimessquare]

hands down, if your programming language doesn't have a GOTO statement, it is a miserable failure

Sorry, but

[AnotherUsername]

Fact - C is the best language of all time. 10 Print "BASIC is the Best Language of All Time"
20 GOTO 10

As you can clearly see,
BASIC is the Best Language of All Time
BASIC is the Best Language of All Time
BASIC is the Best Language of All Time
BASIC is the Best Language of All Time
BASIC is the Best Language of All Time
BASIC is the Best Language of All Time

Re:Ruby and Python are ex-parrots, not Java

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Andrew San, You have a /. id 5K. It is beneath you to take the bait from AC trolls. Still, thank you for taking time to explain your stand.

Re:Off the top of my head?

[jcgf]

I can't tell if you're being serious or if you are trying to mock the way Christians try and convert me all of the time.

Re:Off the top of my head?

[gbjbaanb]

"this load of crap", sir, is the latest cool new thing. Why else would microsoft spend lots of ther precious development and research resources on adding lambda functions to C#, creating F# and why Haskell is now the de-jour of forums and blogs around the world.

Why, I believe you are one of those old style programmers who believe in making things simple, easy to read and maintain, straightforward to develop and simple to understand. How will you appear superior to your colleagues and peers if you write code that they can understand? You have no clue, sir, of the need nowadays to preen your feathers by appearing to "grok" something as obtuse and needlessly obscure as this kind of coding style.

If your code is so simple, and anyone can understand it, then there is no reason why it can't be shipped offshore to Elbonia. So, get with the program and spend at least an hour a day "refactoring" your code to the required level of spaghettiness. Thank you.

Re:Opinions Are Like @ssholes

[neokushan]

Not knowing what exactly "COSA" was, I did the sensible thing and wiki'd it.

Much to my surprise, it redirected me to an article on Sex Addicts Anonymous (I kid you not, try it yourself: wiki COSA).

Upon seeing this, I can't see how it will help computing at all. Hardcore programmers aren't supposed to get laid at all, let alone get laid so much it becomes a problem. But then maybe that IS the problem, maybe all the REAL programmers are off bonking so much, they don't have time to write a decent C++ library for perfect multithreading....

Re:Off the top of my head?

[Just Some Guy]

import crypt;_=r'KZ[i.KqX8jDtA6Uwv!V01d?&iQ#bs,aL\yP<hkAFJ:TE{';print ''.join([crypt.crypt(''.join(x),'ks')[2:5] for x in zip(_[::3],_[1::3],_[2::3])]).replace('/',' ')

Re:Off the top of my head?

[bob.appleyard]

You can't do lambda calculus in Python. I tried, it gave me idiotic syntax errors. Something about the lambda keyword being a crippled piece of shit.

Re:Off the top of my head?

[WaKall]

To be fair, chisels aren't Turing-complete.

When's the last time you saw a contractor with 7 power-drills all made by different manufacturers?

The answer is somewhere in between - one language isn't enough, but many languages are indeed superfluous.

Re:Off the top of my head?

[Kazoo the Clown]

That implies that you should be programming in APL.

I AM programming in APL, you insensitive clod!

Re:Off the top of my head?

[Anonymous Coward]

We could write more correct code per day, but we just end up posting on Slashdot arguing about which programming language is best.

Re:From whose point of view?

[rabiddeity]

Hokey lambda calculus and ancient prefix notation are no match for a good printf at your side, kid.

God invented comments and the Devil countered with

[patio11]

Perl.

"Go ahead, take a bit of the apple. There is more than one way to do it."

Next thing you know there are two naked Perl programmers standing around, who quite sensibly made the decision to cover up because "naked Perl programmer" is a scary, scary concept.