Slashdot Mirror
Why Do Programming Languages Succeed Or Fail?
magicmat writes "UC Berkeley EECS graduate researchers Leo Meyerovich and Ari Rabkin have compiled an interesting data set on the sociological aspects of programming language usage and adoption. 'Socio-PLT' is the result: compiling survey results from Berkeley's recent 'software engineering' massive online open course, SourceForge, and two years of The Hammer Principle online surveys, they have discovered some interesting phenomenon about what we, as programmers think about our languages, and why we use them. You can head over and explore the data yourself using cool interactive visualizations, and even fill out a survey yourself to have your say."
Lisp is very powerful. So it is a good language for all the code that you write.
However I don't use Lisp. I actually prefer stuff like Perl. Why? Because Perl is good for all the code you don't have to write! aka CPAN.
All that code in CPAN that you don't write, is code that you don't have to document, and typically don't have to debug and fix.
Most programmers in the world aren't really writing code where most of the lines of code are "new", revolutionary or innovative. You might write a few innovative things here and there, but the rest? Don't reinvent the wheel - use good libraries/modules.
In areas where nobody else in the world has ever done what you are doing, then it makes sense to use stuff like Lisp or whatever super powerful language that some genius has come up with.
Otherwise if you need to parse and build DHCP packets, perl/CPAN has modules for that. If you need to parse and build a webpage and post a webform, perl/CPAN has modules for that. Talk to DB servers, handle SNMP, SMTP over TLS, ssh, write Excel files, create images, etc they're all on CPAN.