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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.'"
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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...
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.
java failed? are you confusing a platform with a language? java seems pretty healthy on servers and mobile.
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.
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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.
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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.
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