Why Do Programming Languages Succeed Or Fail?

Posted by timothy on Thursday June 7, 2012 @01:25AM from the larry-ellison-blesses-them dept.

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."

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Re:sometimes backwater is good by BenoitRen · 2012-06-07 04:53 · Score: 1, Troll

Look at Objective-C. No pressure for years let this language mature and not have to be a stakced series of kludges. It's a language that hasn't gone off the rails like Java did and now python is about to.

Interesting that you should say that, as Objective-C has to be the biggest kludge of a programming language that I have ever come into contact with. The fact that it began as a C preprocessor language is still apparent today from its messy syntax.