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Why New Programming Languages Succeed Or Fail
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister discusses the proliferation of programming languages and what separates the successful ones from obscurity. 'Some people say we don't need any more programming languages at all. I disagree. But it seems clear that the mainstream won't accept just any language. To be successful, a new language has to be both familiar and innovative — and it shouldn't try to bite off more than it can chew. ... At least part of the formula for success seems to be pure luck, like a band getting its big break. But it also seems much easier for a language to shoot itself in the foot than to skyrocket to stardom.'"
Everyone knows it's the Amount of Facial hair
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Succeed == Adopt. So the question may be rephrased as "Why programmers adopt a language?", and this time you can post a constructive answer.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
What you say is utter bupkis and bullshit. There are many relatively modern languages that have become very popular without having any sort of real compatibility with C, C++, or any other programming language.
Just look at Perl, Python, Ruby, Java and C# for some examples. Those have all arisen in the last 20 to 25 years, well after C was extremely well established. While they can call out to external C code with varying degrees of difficulty, they aren't code-compatible with C in any way. SO HOW IN THE FUCK DID THEY MANAGE TO SUCCEED AND BECOME WILDLY POPULAR IF COMPATIBILITY WITH C IS SO DAMN "MANDATORY"?
Don't expect me to port existing code to your new language
Who says you need to port anything? If the language has a foreign function interface, you can just maintain the old code and build on top of it.
Palm trees and 8
What you can also do, is promise great riches, as in the case of Apple/iOS/Objective-C.
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There is no magic formula. But there are some simple things that I find help me that have NOTHING to do with the language itself, or it's technical advantages/disadvantages. Strangely, they correlate in no way to popularity of the languages
You need a single document to sell me your new language. If you can't explain the concepts, basically, to a programmer in a page or two (enough that if you try to sell EVERYTHING I get bored reading the document as a whole), then it won't wash. If I can't understand why I should use your language, I won't. (Spreading it across a Wiki doesn't count, unless that Wiki has a complete copy available as a PDF or something readable.)
Your documentation should also help when I have a "how the hell do I do X?" question.
You shouldn't just assume that your way is the best. Ever. Just don't. It'll annoy me.
You shouldn't just assume that I'm happy to spend a year learning the quirks of your language.
I should be able to knock up a quick sample program, that uses one of your new features, and understand it in a matter of minutes. Literally. Minutes. Including downloading and installing your compiler / interpreter and getting it running.
Google sort of understood this with Go: http://golang.org/ They have all of the above, and even an online "compiler". They fail a tiny bit with "what's new" and selling the language, really, which is a bit of a shame, but they do a good job.
Ruby does okay too.
But PHP, one of the most popular languages, has a web-site that doubles as a bomb-site. It's hideous and has always put me off, even if they do have some of this information hidden away. It's not selling the language at all(presumably because they're "big enough" for everyone to just know about it). It's like reading a security/release-mailing blog sometimes.
C# doesn't sell the language at all, anywhere, online as far as I can tell. The first hit is Wikipedia. The next few are resource sites.
As far as I can see, C# succeeded because it was backed by a big company. By contrast, Go is still pretty obscure (which shows you there is no magic formula - Go aces a lot of the checklists but still lingers in the background). PHP succeeded because it was quick, simple, powerful and "came first" in terms of web scripting. It also created one of the web's largest security nightmares, which was something it was supposed to replace (Perl CGI).
C was popular because it was unique at the time, and powerful. C++ was popular basically because C was (that doesn't mean it didn't have advantages too, but it got popular by riding along - not by it's own merit at first, but that's what HAS kept it in place ever since).
There's no way to predict a success. Ruby / Rails came out of nowhere as far as I'm concerned and Ruby's been around since the 90's (Has it? Really? Bloody hell! Where was that hiding?). But things like Haskell were around too in that time and have never really caught on.
It seems the criteria are "ready - while being in the right place and right time", and almost the inverse of what you'd expect given a look at how much they want to ease programmers in. It seems that if you want to stand a good chance of being the next-big-thing, make an awful website, don't put up examples, make the simplest thing complicated or impossible, make an horrendous security mess, and then put it online. Then find the next fad, say your language is perfect for it, and push it everywhere you can.
Whether or not a programming language succeeds has a lot to do with how available the tools are. The language must have a good IDE, quality debugger and profilers. If it doesn't have these tools, it's not much use to serious projects. Nobody wants to write a serious application without the use of a modern debugger. If the tools aren't available, are difficult to set up, or cost too much, people won't start using your language. There's plenty of free and really good languages with great tooling out there that you'd have to come up with something pretty extraordinary to succeed without a proper toolset around you language to succeed. Oh that and a big API that does a lot of the work for you. Nobody wants to write all their own libraries for doing things that should be included in the API.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
java failed? are you confusing a platform with a language? java seems pretty healthy on servers and mobile.
I suspect that the "Java failed" post was a sarcastic counter example of a language that stood on its own.
Java is unusual because it had a billion dollar marketing push explaining how it would change everything. Managers were taking Java classes to learn how it would change everything. None of this was aimed at the enterprise. It failed to be adopted most places it was aimed and somehow backed into the enterprise area due to lack of competition among Microsoft alternatives.
So the answer as to why Java didn't fail is probably that Sun bought it a place at the table. On its own merits, I don't think it would have gotten anywhere.
t
Lopes observes that few successful modern languages have roots in academia. An academic herself, she's naturally dismayed....Successful languages have a niche
That's really the heart of it. No matter how "good" a language might be from an academic's perspective, it has to be actually useful to be used.
C was (and still is) a great alternative to Assembly
Java succeeded mostly because it was Not Microsoft, but in part because C++ is a miserable language and the world was ready to replace COBOL, ALGOL/JOVIAL, and FORTRAN.
Ada failed for many reasons, but mostly because it was just glorified Pascal and had all the limitations that made Pascal a good student language but lousy for real work.
Lisp, Perl, Javascript, Python, etc. all fill niches; some niches bigger than others.
Judging by languages that have succeeded over the past 20 years, I would say that the main factor in success is a large company pushing the language. It seems that the average programmer is swayed by marketing just as much as much as anyone else. Then, beyond a certain threshold, network effects kick in. If you want to interoperate with another project, life is easier if you use the same programming language.
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Which is why COBOL is still alive, too much legacy code and too many libraries to re-implement. That doesn't really say much about new languages though, C to C++ is more the exception to the rule here in that it was an extension to C but C itself kept living its own life. Most other languages just grow and grow with one new feature here and one there and a few things deprecated but never really gone. And that's really why most new languages appear, to get rid of all the crud. To get rid of all the legacy code. To get rid of unsafe methods, stupid interfaces, stupid syntax, stupid keywords, inheritance systems, constructors/initialization and whatnot. I program in Qt/C++... but I'd just love to redo it without all the C-isms and take the best from Java and C#, it'd just be a helluva job. Many of the popular languages have had a huge corporation backing them - Sun for Java (now Oracle), Microsoft for C#, it's not just a language but today I'd also expect a fairly complete standard library (which is why I said Qt/C++, I'd not do plain C++) and that's a lot of work.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I would say 'killer application' applies to programmers as much as does to consumers, so 'killer platform' might be the iPhone/iPad and the language in this case might be Objective C ?
New things are always on the horizon
The average programmer doesn't get much say in the matter- it is the company that hires him that does.
However, yes, it comes down to marketing. Big companies like Microsoft have a much better chance of convincing a CIO that they need to be using their language.
Let's assume a theoretical company, Megasoft, produced a language Db - D Flat is much better than C Sharp - it is easier to learn- faster to compile- produces smaller .exes, runs much faster. It even puts the kettle on and makes you a cup of tea whilst you program (coffee if you prefer).
Which company do you think the CIO is going to go with- Microsoft with their flashy brochures- or Megasoft that no-one has heard of with their awesome product.
Right, the CIO will insist that all coding be done with Microsoft. Microsoft will no doubt have given him a t-shirt at the last trade booth. Thus, they are the obvious choice.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
So who was pushing Perl, PHP or Ruby?
Ada did not fail at all. It is used for exactly what it was designed for: mission critical defense applications.
Ada was not designed for intranet or web or mobile or desktop applications, although it can do those things really well.
Judging by languages that have succeeded over the past 20 years, I would say that the main factor in success is a large company pushing the language.
I'm having trouble thinking of any such languages other than Java and C#. I don't recall C (if you go back a bit more than 20 years), Perl, PHP, Python, or JavaScript becoming widely adopted because they were pushed by large companies (though I admit that JavaScript is debatable).
It seems nice when you first read about it but ends up a maintenance nightmare.
No, it doesn't. Anyone who understands C++ reads operators just like functions.
You see +, and translate it in your head to a call to a function called "plus" (technically operator+()).
Well, guess what, no language prevents you from giving functions stupid names. You can write a function in any language called "add" which doesn't add things. Just as in C++ you can write a function called operator+() which doesn't add things. There is *no* difference.
Operator overloading when done well vastly decreases maintainance required because the code becomes much, much simpler to read.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The main one is: Avoid template fuckery. You know that book by Alexandrescu? Don't do that! Well unless you're writing Boost. It's too easy to abuse for no real gain, like the Singleton pattern. Most programming teams will refuse to allow you to use a singleton now, even when it's justifiable, because of the abuses to the pattern. If you're factoring primes with recursive templates at compile time, you're creating a maintenance nightmare and future generations of programmers will curse your name. Though I still think it'd be a fun exercise to do a compile time matrix multiply library...
Not that you can completely avoid using templates in C++. But if you avoid it for as long as you reasonably can, your chances of actually using them well when the time comes are much better. You'll probably still get burned by odd template rules, but at least most of your code won't have that problem.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This is precisely the problem with C++: it's impossible to say what any given line of code actually does without examining every line the compiler has seen before, including other included files.
By definition, if you're using a feature "well" you're using it in a way that's doing more good than harm. That doesn't mean that the feature is good.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Java succeeded because Sun 1) gave it away, and 2) threw money at giving it away. Remember "applets"? Java was supposed to be the programming language of the Web. That didn't work out. It ended up being the new COBOL, which was not Sun's intent.
Some languages fail, or get stuck, because the designer is in love with their own implementation. That happened to Pascal and Python. Wirth's own Pascal implementation was a cute little recursive-descent compiler that generated RPN byte codes, like a Java compiler. Wirth resisted changes to the language that would allow programming in the large. ISO Pascal reflects his biases. So Pascal became stuck in an educational niche. The original Macintosh software was all written in an extended Pascal, as was much '80s software. But everybody had a different dialect - there was Turbo Pascal, Clascal, and a few others. They never merged.
Modula, Wirth's second try, was also crippled in certain ways. Modula 2 was better. Modula 3 was good enough to be used to write an operating system kernel. Unfortunately, Modula 3 was only used with DEC, which died after being acquired by Compaq.
Python has some of the same problems. The feature set of Python reflects what it's easy to implement in a naive interpreter, like von Rossum's CPython. Internally, everything is an object, even integers and floats, and object access involves dictionary lookups. This makes CPython slow. Every attempt to speed up Python substantially has hit a wall, including Google's "Unladen Swallow" effort. (PyPy is making progress, but it's taken a decade and requires an incredibly complex internal combination of interpreters and compilers.)
The biggest disappointment to me has been that we're still stuck with C. C has two killer bad design decisions - the language doesn't know how big arrays are, and the "pointer=array" thing lies to the language. Both reflect how things are done in assembler, and the fact that the original compiler had to fit in a 128K PDP-11. Most of the millions of buffer overflows and crashes that occur daily can be traced to those two design decisions. (C++, as I point out occasional, tries to paper over these problems with collection classes. But the mold usually seeps through the wallpaper, since most operating system and library calls want raw C pointers.)
I really can't agree with that. Which large companies pushed perl, ruby, or python? Those who pushed were not large by the standards of the global IT market. It was the fact that many smaller companies and development houses got on board, seeding the market with programmers who knew the new languages, that made them successful.
And even the "successful" ones have had limited success. For example, show me a non-web application that was developed with Ruby and not using Rails. Now granted, the libraries and frameworks of a language (like JEE) have a great deal to do with their acceptance by the industry, but I think it speaks volumes about the supposed benefits of some of these languages that they went no where until someone was fanatical enough to write framework libraries using them.
In a sense, the role of the language itself seems to have shifted to the lower levels of the machine, almost assembly-like. In the meantime, the application framework has become the new "programming API" of the language library, rather than the boring and basic string and math functions that used to comprise language libraries. People now drop out of the framework into custom code only when they are forced to, with the bulk of the coding being more in the use of annotations and tags to tie pieces of the application together automagically rather than having to be expressly coded with multiple lines of low-level code.
Of course this all comes at a price. The more you rely on things like tags and annotations, the more your code is relying on introspection and adaptive code, which is inherently slower than code which was written specifically for the attribute accessors and data types being manipulated.
Worse, some of the framework libraries I've seen make the horrendous mistake of completely ignoring the protocols and communications styles used by legacy code. If you're going to succeed in the business arena (where most coding is done), you HAVE to deal with those old systems, and that means making it easy to deal with EDI transforms as well as XML based IOs.
By no means am I arguing that we don't need specialized languages for special purposes in the overall application stack. Tools like Ruby on Rails are needed to simplify work in their slice of the system pie. But I can't see there being another "big thing" like Java or C# any time in the near future, but rather the continued evolution of those languages.
Another factor is that people get tired of playing with new languages when they don't take off, and that speaks volumes to their fitness for a purpose. Languages like C++ took over a decade to really catch on, but their ideas were novel enough that the early adopters stuck with them and kept using them while momentum built. Nowadays if you don't have significant mindshare within a few years, people seem to give up and move on to something else/better. Were these languages really a significant improvement, their fans would stick with them and promote their use despite their unpopularity.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.