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."

Comments

Same way as real languages

[Kjella]

English isn't the world's most spoken language (when you include secondary speakers) for its elegance, consistency or expressiveness. It's a combination of history and politics and power and isolation and culture and grabbing concepts and words and pronunciation from other languages. Languages are the same, some exist practically by being first. Some exist only because they've had large companies like Sun or Java backing them. Others survive because they've been isolated cornering a specific need in finance or science or academia. I remember Java 1.0 and very early Javascript, that the world is now full of Android and AJAX apps is nothing short of a freak of history. Trying to analyze it from the language's qualities alone is never going to give meaningful results.