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Over at ACM.org, Doug Meil posits that programming languages are often designed for certain tasks or workloads in mind, and in that sense most languages differ less in what they make possible, and more in terms of what they make easy:
I had the opportunity to visit the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, a few years ago. It's a terrific museum, and among the many exhibits is a wall-size graph of the evolution of programming languages. This graph is so big that anyone who has ever written "Hello World" in anything has the urge to stick their nose against the wall and search section by section to try find their favorite languages. I certainly did. The next instinct is to trace the "influenced" edges of the graph with their index finger backwards in time. Or forwards, depending on how old the languages happen to be.
[...] There is so much that can be taken for granted in computing today. Back in the early days everything was expensive and limited: storage, memory, and processing power. People had to walk uphill and against the wind, both ways, just to get to the computer lab, and then stay up all night to get computer time. One thing that was easier during that time was that the programming language namespace was greenfield, and initial ones from the 1950's and 1960's had the luxury of being named precisely for the thing they did: FORTRAN (Formula Translator), COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), ALGOL (Algorithmic Language), LISP (List Processor). Most people probably haven't heard of SNOBOL (String Oriented and Symbolic Language, 1962), but one doesn't need many guesses to determine what it was trying to do. Had object-oriented programming concepts been more fully understood during that time, it's possible we would be coding in something like "OBJOL" —an unambiguously named object-oriented language, at least by naming patterns of the era.
It's worth noting and admiring the audacity of PL/I (1964), which was aiming to be that "one good programming language." The name says it all: Programming Language 1. There should be no need for 2, 3, or 4. Though PL/I's plans of becoming the Highlander of computer programming didn't play out like the designers intended, they were still pulling on a key thread in software: why so many languages? That question was already being asked as far back as the early 1960's.
The author goes on to reason that new languages are mostly created for control and fortune, citing Microsoft's C# as an example of their answer to Java for a middleware language they could control.
Related:
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10 Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday July 13 2022, @07:40AM (7 children)
I've heard a similar Microsoft vs. Borland account where the decision fell in favor of Microsoft since they were offering free on-site support where Borland weren't even willing to put down a rough quota on paper. Also note that while engineering consider having all your software come from the same vendor as putting all your eggs in one basket, for acquisitions it means having better leverage since the bigger you are as a client, the better are the deals and treatment in general. So, from management's of view, out-spending a single development effort is often worth deepening a service deal. And note how it's yet another side to that "c++ is often chosen to lock out competition" thing: A lot of what we think of as pure technical decisions goes down to job market, hiring options and third-party corporate connections.
Yeah that's pretty typical to the east coast. The legal and finance frameworks in New York and Texas are damn right hostile to startups.
Anyhow, this ties well to my point: C++ isn't simply just a (bad) programming language. It's a specific supply chain of HR, tooling and compiler/OS providers that is not only unjustified on technical considerations, but also involves some dubious business practices. i.e. It's always support package deals here, vendor lock there type things... And to most businesses, especially the small-to-medium ones, it's not only a bad technical choice, it's that entering into that particular ecosystem is damn right hazardous. And when you think about it like that, the whole Nukia-Microsoft and Qt/Trolltech situation doesn't become one bad anecdote. It's simply the nature of heavy weight tools: If you depend on a big language and a big os, you're going to need to be able to deal with big companies. So, unless you are a big company, that's not a bed you want to get into.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 13 2022, @11:34AM (6 children)
Thank you for sharing your opinions. We agree on most of the facts, but from the perspective of small startups to medium sized dev teams in larger corporations, I arrive at different conclusions.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RamiK on Wednesday July 13 2022, @12:14PM (5 children)
Yeah I can't argue with that.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 15 2022, @02:06PM (4 children)
And if you really want to program in Lisp, it isn't all that far away: https://github.com/Robert-van-Engelen/tinylisp [github.com]
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday July 15 2022, @07:06PM (3 children)
Meanwhile in Texas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXvJ8duZqdA [youtube.com]
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 15 2022, @07:38PM (2 children)
Cool. When I was in school my programmable calculator had the one true language: BASIC. Graphing calculators weren't a thing yet.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday July 16 2022, @08:37AM (1 child)
Did it have an alpha-numeric display or a dot matrix? If it's running BASIC, it has indirect addressing and conditional branching so you only need the high-res display to draw graphs...
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday July 16 2022, @01:27PM
It was dot matrix but resolution was something like 128x8 and I believe it was only character addressable from the software layer.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end