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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?"

2 of 1,119 comments (clear)

  1. ... Evolution... by Manip · · Score: 1, Troll

    Either evolve or die.

    Java hasn't changed all that much in the last few years and younger languages are pushing programming further.

    Although oddly enough the languages for which I speak are things like C# and not "I wish it would die but it likely won't" languages like Python.

    1. Re:... Evolution... by Mongoose+Disciple · · Score: 1, Troll

      Have you seen the new 3.0 libraries?? MS Application blocks look a lot like J2EE when it first came out + the best of Jakarta that we have all been using for almost a decade. Don't get me wrong C# does a lot of "good" stuff... but a lot of its most "innovative" stuff is just finally bringing it up to snuff with the way we have all been using J2EE since the dot com bust.

      I grant you, the first years of C# were (depending on your perspective) either a blatant rip-off of Java, or the kind of language you get when someone who's used Java for a few years and mostly thinks it's good, but is pissed off about a couple things and decides to fix them creates a new language.

      That being said, most of that application block stuff is 5 or more years old and isn't what anyone remotely current on .NET would hold up as examples of C# innovation.

      As someone who's spent years developing with both Java and C#, at this point, C# is now ahead of Java, and Java is mimicking it to try to catch up. (We're talking core language here -- obviously there are libraries/tools that came out of the Java community that C# is still catching up to.) I hope the practice of stealing the best ideas from the other and competition continues to make both better for it.