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

grmbl.

[thhamm]

What Makes a Programming Language Successful?

those who don't know how to use it.

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!

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

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: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:From whose point of view?

[rabiddeity]

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