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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?"
Portability and scalability are what win it for me, I like to write my code once and it's got to be powerful enough to deliver a complex solution.
Procrastinators, Unite Tomorrow!!
Java's well organized, has a great standard library and is (mostly) consistent with itself. Its only problems, as far as I can see, was that it was initially slow and that it marketed itself as a web language, when there were better choices for that.
Disclaimer: I've only coded in Java since 1.5.
Power: What can it do?
Performance: How fast can it do it?
Ease of Development: How fast can quality code be turned out by regular programmers?
Most modern languages fail on a couple of these. C is first class in Power and Performance, but it's not Easy. Ruby is okay in Power, and its very Easy, but it's slow. Java is Powerful, but doesn't match C for Performance, and it's not the quickest for development.
I'm sure many fanboys will disagree with my analysis. They'll say "Regular programmers don't matter (C)" or "It's NOT SLOW (Ruby)" or "Development is too quick! (Java)".
Really though, that's what it comes down to. The problem is, that there are unfortunate tradeoffs that have to be made. Most languages have a strength, but they all make sacrifices to be strong.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I think many people fail to recognize that the average age of software engineers has gotten higher and that many have realized that most of the pitfalls in software development have little to do with the language chosen. I would rather concentrate on good engineering practices and refining familiar modules I have developed than learn a new language.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Not to sound too much like Obi Wan, but many of the truths we cling to depend a great deal on our own point of view and all that.
If I was working for O'Reilly, Manning, APress, Wiley, et al I'd say a successful programming language was one which sold lots of books.
If I was a hiring manager for a large software company, I'd look closely at what language allowed the most cheap new grads to work together an produce something resembling quality code.
If I was teaching intro to computer science, I'd worry about what was preparing my students for the rest of their education.
If I was teaching a certificate-level course to people looking to get into the job market quickly, I'd look for the language with the highest placement rate.
If I was a person of little clue, I'd go largely by the hype. Some would go with the mainstream hype, and some go with the counter cultural "that's the big hype, but our language is better" underdog hype.
As a programmer, I prefer the language that helps me turn customer requirements into working programs that fastest with the least fuss on my part, and allows decent maintenance and customization later.
As the owner of a small boutique programming shop, I want my expressive, powerful language to give me an advantage over others using less expressive languages. I'd like to find others who can use it, but a few is alright as I don't need a huge team to work on programs.
Every program on your screen and your OS was written in C/C++
I just started at a new job at the beginning of this year after quitting from my last job where I barely got to do any programming. The place where I work now is a Java shop. I was getting back to Java programming after a hiatus of a few years. For the last few years I mostly doing Perl with a smattering of C (PHP and Javascript on occasion). My experience with Java was mainly from college and a few odd projects I did here and there. The language had changed quite a bit over the last few years and to be honest, I surprised myself by being happy to get back to it (I had some sort of vague dislike for it for a period of time).
The company sponsored a trip to JavaOne at San Francisco earlier this month, for the Dev Team. I also got to go. This was my first time at JavaOne. It was amazing, exciting, and I learnt a LOT of new stuff. The main thing I got from there was that Java, far from being a programming language, is also a platform. There are a lot of new things being built on TOP of Java. For example, Groovy, and JavaFX. Java now has excellent support and frameworks to roll your OWN domain-specific languages.
Python and Ruby are not going to push Java out of the way. For example, you have mergers of Java with these languages (Jython and JRuby). Essentially you have Python and Ruby using Java resources and libraries. I think instead of "dying", Java is just going to evolve into a stable platform that lets you build stuff on top of it.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
You didn't review any C either, yet we all know that the language is out there and being used. Same with perl.
I think your field of work is too narrow to be completely explanatory.
Btw, I do agree with your general point - I don't see python or ruby bumping aside java. But your personal experience, extensive as it appears, is not enough to derive that conclusion
-Jeff
P.S. I really wish java would go. I hate the upper/lower case thing in all the names.
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
yeah, you know, 'cause when you have 50 programmers on a project, C l33tnesses like
while (x-->0) { blah; }
are so cool and easy to understand. and malloc()s make memory management so easy and cross-platform. and clustering is for wussies, if you need more than a core2duo on Linux, is because you're unl33t or because you need to do some routines in über-ELITE assembler.
now when you program in Java you forget all that crap, you just code. need a bigger app? J2EE it and run it on a cluster. add nodes a needed to keep performance. node dies? no problem, J2EE takes care of it.
migrated from mysql to Oracle or DB2? no problem, just let Hibernate know about it.
tired of Windows Server and want to run opensolaris, linux or OS X Server? no problem, just drop your EAR/WAR on the new server and relax. it's working.
wanna add more coders to your project? point 'em to the javadoc and let they read through the verbose (and thus self-explaining) code.
strong typing is there to keep you from doing stupid things. you can always tell what the program IS going to do in all situations, because you HAVE to specify all situations.
but you're too cool for java. lemme know when banks switch their systems to LAMP and we'll talk.
Do you ever think that maybe your survey has a heavy self-selection bias? I mean it seems to me that the most likely candidates for security reviews would be applications that have been around long enough to have somebody in management say, "Hey, we need to have a third party review this!". This explains how FIVE PERCENT of your applications are COBOL while only "three" are PHP. By your analysis, it's as if C/C++ doesn't even exist...
I'll take any language that can let me write, read, and understand as fast as the speed of computers is progressing, i.e., exponentially.
I don't give a crap if language xxxxxxx is more efficient, more hardcore, etc. You know why?
Because I don't want to spend a year writing an application in C for efficiency and find out at the end that for a mere $1,000 I could have written the same thing in Python in a month and just bought a faster computer 11 months later.
YOUR time is linear, while the computer's is exponential. You'd be a fool to not take advantage of that and, frankly, type safety, efficiency, platform independence, programming style, power, etc. etc. can all go to hell. Just give me a beautiful language.
I am completely confused as to how the author can even ask the question "Is COBOL a success?"
Is COBOL old? Certainly.
Is COBOL outdated? Yes.
Has COBOL since been replaced by better languages? Yep.
Would you be insane to start a new, large, application from scratch using COBOL? Of course.
But "Is COBOL a success?" Without doubt, yes. Countless millions (perhaps) billions of lines of production COBOL code are still in use. It is still the core behind many of the applications that run our day-to-day lives. These applications have been running for decades with downtime records that would put an average "Web 2.0" app to shame.
Certainly, IBM deserves a lot of credit for this, maintaining pure 100% backward compatibility for those apps for the last forty years or so, but some credit is due to the language itself.
SirWired
Not every big library is bloated. It's only bloat if it has a poor size to functionality ratio.
For example libc is small, but it does not include XML parsing, HTTP support, SHA1 and MD5 sums, the ability to read compressed files etc. Sure there are libraries for that, but you have to pick and add them yourself. So libc is small not because it is amazingly efficient, but because it is limited in scope.
Personally, I like big standard libraries like Java and Python have. You pay for it in the initial install, but once that is in place, your application has access to a huge amount of functionality without having to add a lot of external dependencies.