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."

Because of stupid names

[dargaud]

Some languages fail simply because the creators have chosen stupid names in the age of Internet searches: try searching for one liners or tutorials in 'R' or 'Go' or 'D' and you'll find tons of irrelevant links. I'll make an exception with C since there's simply more stuff out there about the language than about any other use of the letter. Now Brainfuck [wikipedia.org], that's a perfect name for a language.