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What Makes a Programming Language Successful?

Posted by timothy on from the users-programs-books-community dept.

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?"

14 of 1,119 comments (clear)

  1. Beards by AioKits · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    "Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
  2. grmbl. by thhamm · · Score: 4, Funny

    What Makes a Programming Language Successful?

    those who don't know how to use it.

  3. Re:Back to Basic by D+Ninja · · Score: 5, Funny

    the possibility to write unreadable code Hate to break it to you, but that's a possibility in any language.
  4. Knuth said that the most important thing is... by dapyx · · Score: 5, Funny
    ...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
    --
    I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is an imaginary number. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and dial again.
  5. Re:I don't really get the Java hate around here by leighklotz · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  6. Re:Back to Basic by D+Ninja · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.)

  7. LOL perl by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?"

  8. Re:Off the top of my head? by Firehed · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
    --
    How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
  9. Re:From whose point of view? by Reverend528 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Not to sound too much like Obi Wan
    These are your father's parentheses. Elegant weapons, for a more... civilized age.
    --
    Badass Resumes
  10. Re:All Programming Languages Suck by SQLGuru · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  11. a GOTO statement by circletimessquare · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    --
    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
  12. Re:Off the top of my head? by jcgf · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  13. Re:Off the top of my head? by gbjbaanb · · Score: 5, Funny

    "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.

  14. Re:Off the top of my head? by WaKall · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.