Why Do Programming Languages Succeed Or Fail? 201
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."
Déjà vu (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Girl Analogy (Score:2, Informative)
"Programming languages must have a certain elegance, a flow or symmetry that entices the mind. Pascal/Delhpi have always done that for me."
Try Scheme.
Designed to get a job done (Score:5, Informative)
Since PHP and Javascript stubbornly remain popular.
One distinction is whether the language was designed to meet a practical need, or to prove an abstract point in computer science. Plus, these days, the API is probably more important than the language - its certainly more work to learn a new API than a new language.
PHP is a crap language, but it gets the job done, makes it easy to programatically generate HTML and comes with a humungous library of useful functions. Plus, its widely available on commercial web-hosting services. When I tried some Python (after forcing myself to stop worrying and get past the 'significant whitespace' thing) , I found I wanted an XML/XPath/DOM library but all I could find were several half-finished attempts and a lot of discussion about what would be a suitably "Pythonesque" XML API (the well-defined standard DOM API sounds good to me). Maybe I was unlucky (Python isn't exactly unsuccessful) but that would have been a no-brainer in PHP, Java or C.
Likewise, Javascript is the only game in town for scripting web pages and has become almost platform-independent. It also became joined at the hip with the HTML DOM.
Java also had the big practical plus of being almost platform independent - and again now has a huge array of APIs that programmers have spent time learning.
Or look at C vs Pascal. VAX Pascal, Turbo Pascal, Delphi et. al. were quite successful because they each extended the language in proprietary ways, but standard Pascal was useless for anything other than teaching algorithms because it didn't have any practical API to speak of (you couldn't even open a named file within a Pascal program - that had to be done externally). C, on the other hand, always had a "de facto" standard library consisting of the subset of the Unix API described in "The C Programming Language", full of really useful utility routines for strings, file handling, output formatting, searching etc. You could do a lot in standard C without tying yourself to a particular dialect or platform, and the pre-processor let you #ifdef your way out of any incompatibilities that you did encounter.
C++ - a can of worms which only a language lawyer could love - probably hit the big time because of MS Visual C++ and the MS Foundation Classes. That and the fact that C programmers didn't think they had to learn a whole new language (see earlier comment about cans of worms).
Basically, don't expect your mathematically elegant new language (with no variables, who's only operator is 'is a subset of' and which uses UNICODE accents and ligatures to increase its expressivity) to take off unless it has POSIX regexps, bindings to MS Access and a WIndows application framework.
Re:Because programmers use them or they don't (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:simple: imperative, portable, objects, librarie (Score:4, Informative)
C took off because it allowed imperative programming more easily (and portably) than assembler
Also because its use in the development of Unix meant that it had a huge (by the standards of the time) body of existing code and libraries by the time it was sprung upon an unsuspecting world. The very fact that you could use this portable, (moderately) high-level language for writing a complete OS without abandoning performance was a revelation. And the fact that Unix began invading universities shortly thereafter helped as well.
Since the rise of C, some loose compatibility with C has been a major factor too. When it came to powerful scripting languages, we had Rexx and Perl--and which one had a more C-like syntax? That's right, the one that succeeded, Perl. And Java is notable for it's C(++)-ness too.
It's rarely one or two simple factors, but usually a whole mess of things.
(As for functional programming, I think that's pretty much been a non-issue the whole time.)