What Makes a Programming Language Successful? 1119
danielstoner writes "The article '13 reasons why Ruby, Python and the gang will push Java to die... of old age' makes an interesting analysis of the programming languages battling for a place in programmers' minds. What really makes a language popular? What really makes a language 'good'? What is success for a programming language? Can we say COBOL is a successful language? What about Ruby, Python, etc?"
Off the top of my head? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't really get the Java hate around here (Score:5, Insightful)
Java's well organized, has a great standard library and is (mostly) consistent with itself. Its only problems, as far as I can see, was that it was initially slow and that it marketed itself as a web language, when there were better choices for that.
Disclaimer: I've only coded in Java since 1.5.
Easy. (Score:5, Insightful)
Performance: How fast can it do it?
Ease of Development: How fast can quality code be turned out by regular programmers?
Most modern languages fail on a couple of these. C is first class in Power and Performance, but it's not Easy. Ruby is okay in Power, and its very Easy, but it's slow. Java is Powerful, but doesn't match C for Performance, and it's not the quickest for development.
I'm sure many fanboys will disagree with my analysis. They'll say "Regular programmers don't matter (C)" or "It's NOT SLOW (Ruby)" or "Development is too quick! (Java)".
Really though, that's what it comes down to. The problem is, that there are unfortunate tradeoffs that have to be made. Most languages have a strength, but they all make sacrifices to be strong.
Aging Engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't really get the Java hate around here (Score:3, Insightful)
Before 1.5 it was harder to avoid those dreaded ClassCastException:s that you could get from Lists and Maps.
But it's still the NullPointerExceptions left to take care of.
From whose point of view? (Score:5, Insightful)
If I was working for O'Reilly, Manning, APress, Wiley, et al I'd say a successful programming language was one which sold lots of books.
If I was a hiring manager for a large software company, I'd look closely at what language allowed the most cheap new grads to work together an produce something resembling quality code.
If I was teaching intro to computer science, I'd worry about what was preparing my students for the rest of their education.
If I was teaching a certificate-level course to people looking to get into the job market quickly, I'd look for the language with the highest placement rate.
If I was a person of little clue, I'd go largely by the hype. Some would go with the mainstream hype, and some go with the counter cultural "that's the big hype, but our language is better" underdog hype.
As a programmer, I prefer the language that helps me turn customer requirements into working programs that fastest with the least fuss on my part, and allows decent maintenance and customization later.
As the owner of a small boutique programming shop, I want my expressive, powerful language to give me an advantage over others using less expressive languages. I'd like to find others who can use it, but a few is alright as I don't need a huge team to work on programs.
Quck! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don't really get the Java hate around here (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't really get the Java hate around here (Score:2, Insightful)
Free market economy (Score:1, Insightful)
1) If people use it.
2) If you can find people who will pay you to use it. And assorted corollaries: if people will hire you because you know how to use it, etc...
Given that programmers need to eat, I'd tend to go with the second though the two are basically related anyways.
Re:Ruby and Python are ex-parrots, not Java (Score:0, Insightful)
Or, if you make the above information publicly known that you haven't reviewed Ruby or Python code that's a pretty good reason for someone to choose somebody else to review their code. Why would they pick a guy with little experience in that language?
Re:I don't really get the Java hate around here (Score:5, Insightful)
Same with any interpreted language. PHP, Python, same problem if you are using deprecated accessors. Heck, even the MySQL connector worked differently in PHP3
Are you really suggesting that every time there's a new version they change the name of the language? What about changing the name of every program you write just because you altered the API? Why would you say it's unacceptable?
Re:I don't really get the Java hate around here (Score:5, Insightful)
While Generics add a lot of protection by making your List strongly typed, using instanceof checks will protect your code when using a List.
Re:Off the top of my head? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the point is "which tool fits the current need best." Far too many people seem to want to use a hammer when a screwdriver would work better out of potentially misguided allegiances. Languages are no different than any other tool.
I suspect TFA is more 'overrated' than 'insightful' since it makes some gross generalizations, cites search results as indicators of popularity, and completely neglects some of the nicer features of the popular scripting languages.
Re:Off the top of my head? (Score:5, Insightful)
Python also plays well with C [python.org], so it's often used in concert with C for interfaces, etc.
Re:I don't really get the Java hate around here (Score:2, Insightful)
Java's not going to die (Score:5, Insightful)
The company sponsored a trip to JavaOne at San Francisco earlier this month, for the Dev Team. I also got to go. This was my first time at JavaOne. It was amazing, exciting, and I learnt a LOT of new stuff. The main thing I got from there was that Java, far from being a programming language, is also a platform. There are a lot of new things being built on TOP of Java. For example, Groovy [codehaus.org], and JavaFX [javafx.com]. Java now has excellent support and frameworks to roll your OWN domain-specific languages.
Python and Ruby are not going to push Java out of the way. For example, you have mergers of Java with these languages (Jython and JRuby). Essentially you have Python and Ruby using Java resources and libraries. I think instead of "dying", Java is just going to evolve into a stable platform that lets you build stuff on top of it.
Re:Aging Engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
The kids wanted to do OOP. My father felt there wasn't enough memory to do this effectively and it was foolish.
The reality was, that the kids just wanted to pretend they were doing OOP. They still used straight C, they just created structs and organized functions in files as if they were classes. It was actually rather clever and made it easier to maintain.
It's hard as you get older, I think, you hear about some new idea as the silver bullet and your immediate reaction is negative because you've heard this so many times before. But you have to have an open mind, and watch and see what is happening.
Otherwise you'll end up as a COBOL developer.
What makes a programming language successful? (Score:4, Insightful)
Same thing that makes a religion successful. Adherents.
Re:Ruby and Python are ex-parrots, not Java (Score:5, Insightful)
I think your field of work is too narrow to be completely explanatory.
Btw, I do agree with your general point - I don't see python or ruby bumping aside java. But your personal experience, extensive as it appears, is not enough to derive that conclusion
-Jeff
P.S. I really wish java would go. I hate the upper/lower case thing in all the names.
Re:I don't really get the Java hate around here (Score:4, Insightful)
And the point of software is the usage, not the creation. So dealing with issues during creation is the developer's problem. It needs to be usable by the client.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Off the top of my head? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think that Ruby is bad, not by a long shot. It's seems fairly decent and it doesn't seem to be lacking anything necessary. I'm just curious as to why someone would pick Ruby over some other language. I'm not quite understanding what the "killer app" of Ruby is. I'm not sure why this language had to be created.
My understanding is that the main reason for choosing Ruby is to use it with Rails (which I have not looked at yet). And yet it's rare for me to read a good word about Ruby on Rails.
Does anyone else get the impression that a lot of these newer languages are simply solutions that are looking for problems?
Re:Ruby and Python making Java die? Ha! (Score:3, Insightful)
TFA:
Re:I don't really get the Java hate around here (Score:3, Insightful)
> With itself.
When I see "itself" I consider "Java 1.4.02_09" and "Java 1.4.02_12" to be within the realm of "itself". Yet these two versions (just as an example pair, my argument is not exclusive to just those exact versions) have compatibility problems. Or rather, the developer of the software we use has those problems. But the fact that upgrading by an extremely minor amount (I'd say a 0.0.0.03 version increase is extremely minor) can break an application tells me that there is something wrong with the underlying program.
Re:I don't really get the Java hate around here (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Perhaps a better measurement than /. popularity (Score:3, Insightful)
1. They have highly experienced developers that are widely available.
2. Apps written in them are generally older and have been time-tested and are reliable.
3. The language and its behavior is well understood and is well honed.
4. Many libraries are available
Changing to the latest and greatest language demands that you have a damn good reason. Hopefully you just have to port an existing app but you'll have to start all over with QA testing, security analysis, etc. Usually the reasons for changing are:
1. The pool of developers for that language has gotten too small to continue development and/or maintenance.
2. Hardware changes demand it.
3. The performance gain from changing is too big to ignore.
4. Compatability reasons with other apps, major customers, etc.
Making a programmer feel cutting edge isn't a good reason.
Re:I don't really get the Java hate around here (Score:2, Insightful)
A ClassCastException recast to whatever Exception you want (or inspected as is at your exception handler level) is exactly the same as an instanceof test.
Re:I don't really get the Java hate around here (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it suggests that he hasn't coded Java for very long.
Regardless, if you're building a web application, you're probably not going to build it in Bash. The right tool for the job, and all that.
It's silly to say "Language A is better than Language B". What makes more sense is "Language A is better than Language B at task X."
Java is the right tool for many jobs. It'll die shortly after C dies (in other words, not anytime soon).
Re:Off the top of my head? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don't really get the Java hate around here (Score:5, Insightful)
I would also note that community can have a huge effect. Obviously the size of a community will have a strong effect on whether usage of the language remains, grows, or shrinks. After all, you are more likely to learn a language if you hear about it, if it's used in many other projects, etc.
Additionally, community is important in terms of the amount of support you get. Languages with strong communities will have thousands of online tutorials, excellent forums that provide responsive help, freely available code snippets, plenty of libraries and add-ons, and so on. This kind of 'free support' is often more useful than even careful and exact core documentation.
As a personal example, I (have to) use a programing environment called "Igor Pro [wikipedia.org]" at work. The language syntax bothers me a bit--but on the other hand it is specialized to do some of the things we need it to. But what I really hate about it is the lack of community. When I Google for an answer to a problem I'm having, I get nothing. When I try to find a pre-made package for a non-core feature, it doesn't exist.
Compare that to solving the same programming problem in, for example, Python. Even if it's not the optimal language, the fact that I get find tons of help online, and that there are so many community-developed packages and libraries, means that I can often solve the problem much faster.
When evaluating new languages (and new software products), I always take the time to find out what the community is like. It can make all the difference.
Re:Yes, sure, it is the evil gang... (Score:5, Insightful)
while (x-->0) { blah; }
are so cool and easy to understand. and malloc()s make memory management so easy and cross-platform. and clustering is for wussies, if you need more than a core2duo on Linux, is because you're unl33t or because you need to do some routines in über-ELITE assembler.
now when you program in Java you forget all that crap, you just code. need a bigger app? J2EE it and run it on a cluster. add nodes a needed to keep performance. node dies? no problem, J2EE takes care of it.
migrated from mysql to Oracle or DB2? no problem, just let Hibernate know about it.
tired of Windows Server and want to run opensolaris, linux or OS X Server? no problem, just drop your EAR/WAR on the new server and relax. it's working.
wanna add more coders to your project? point 'em to the javadoc and let they read through the verbose (and thus self-explaining) code.
strong typing is there to keep you from doing stupid things. you can always tell what the program IS going to do in all situations, because you HAVE to specify all situations.
but you're too cool for java. lemme know when banks switch their systems to LAMP and we'll talk.
Re:Ruby and Python are ex-parrots, not Java (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you ever think that maybe your survey has a heavy self-selection bias? I mean it seems to me that the most likely candidates for security reviews would be applications that have been around long enough to have somebody in management say, "Hey, we need to have a third party review this!". This explains how FIVE PERCENT of your applications are COBOL while only "three" are PHP. By your analysis, it's as if C/C++ doesn't even exist...
FFS (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone can play Devil's Advocate and make one language look better than another from some point of view, but the fact is, different languages have their different pluses and minuses. I'm sure Ruby and Python have their pluses, but I don't see them being used NEARLY as much as Java. And take into consideration that Ruby has been around just as long as Java and Python has 4 years on both languages. If they were going to kick Java's ass, it would have happened by now.
I suspect the article is wishful thinking (though I can't read it 'cause the site didn't survive this post). I don't know why people have to make such a big deal about this stuff anyway. Languages evolve and new languages and paradigms will be created in the future. Computer programming is still in its infancy. There's a good possibility that 20-30 years down the road, none of these languages will be around. They may be completely replaced by some far more powerful paradigm we can't even imagine yet.
These kinds of predictions are old and pointless.
Java Cannot be 100% Replaced (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Off the top of my head? (Score:5, Insightful)
If I can start a project in a particular language, get hit by a bus half way through, and finding someone else to sit in my seat and finish the project isn't a problem, then the language is a success. If I don't have that confidence, then the language is nothing but an interesting curiosity for academics.
Pretty cut and dried.
Re:Easy. (Score:3, Insightful)
Power: Pretty powerful, unless you want to tinker with an OS kernel or something.
Performance: Very good, even for a garbage collected language.
Ease of development: Very easy, if you have a decent IDE.
Re:Off the top of my head? (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate any language that places significance on whitespace (if they would have just put a complex type into C we could have killed fortran before the 77 version and this Python shit wouldn't be here but alas).
I also only find Monty Python mildly amusing at best (the jokes are funny but go on for too long and I'm growing tired of all the idiots that quote it all the time).
Fact - C is the best language of all time. If your program is more than a few lines of bash it should be in C. Ritchie is God (yeah that's right, capital 'G') and Stroustrup should be shot for sacrilege!
To mod troll or funny; that is the question. The thing is I'm not kidding.
Re:Languages and technology stacks (Score:4, Insightful)
> Honestly, C is full of design errors.
Come back when you know how the computer works, grasshopper. C doesn't treat arrays as "objects" because the computer doesn't do that. If you want higher level abstractions, use C++, where you have the nice vector class that does what you want.
Re:Ruby and Python are ex-parrots, not Java (Score:3, Insightful)
The real question is, should "EasyToReadAndEasyToType" be a different symbol from "easyToReadAndEasyToType"?
I happen to think the answer is "yes, it should be a different symbol". But that's a separate issue from whether you can use camel case in case-insensitive languages.
Re:I don't really get the Java hate around here (Score:4, Insightful)
Now that's nonsense if I've ever heard it. If that were true, Linux distros wouldn't need package managers.
Re:I don't really get the Java hate around here (Score:3, Insightful)
Old age (Score:2, Insightful)
In many regards, concerning its lifetime, C has been/will be around for a very long time too... Which, I think, is probably one of the signs of a good language. Because if it was so horrible/people could not get their stuff done reliably, no one would use it.
Re:From whose point of view? (Score:1, Insightful)
Given my choice I would hire an engineer with 5-10 years of experience instead of 5 of those cheap new grads" and save a bunch of money.
Re:I don't really get the Java hate around here (Score:3, Insightful)
-Em
Re:I don't really get the Java hate around here (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't have enough experience with the others on your list to vouch for them, but I often see Ruby on these lists and my experience with both doesn't bear it out.
Re:Ruby and Python are ex-parrots, not Java (Score:4, Insightful)
However, you have a point to a degree - I am initially more productive reviewing frameworks I am familiar with. But that doesn't mean I would be ineffective at reviewing Python or Ruby. It would take me about half a day to spin up in any language or framework as I found things that are missing. And that's the important thing:
I hate reviewing apps with zero security engineering. It's exactly like shooting fish in a barrel, but hopeless as you're not going to get a nice fish stew at the end.
What I look for are meta-issues found in all languages and frameworks. Syntax and functions can be found in online references - if you need them.
There is nothing special about any language as few protect against the security artifacts we look for.
For example, if your code has an access control mechanism, I look at it in situ on a live test app, deciding how best I might attack it, and then research using the code how I can obviate it at different levels:
* Coarse grained - is this feature access controlled at all? This is definitely a problem for J2EE apps that use servlets as folks think presentation level security is adequate. It's not
* Medium grained - does this feature offer different levels of access based upon your role? If so, how does this mechanism work? What do I do to get around it and steal stuff?
* Fine grained - does this feature restrict access to secured resources (direct object references)? If so, how does this mechanism work?
Each of the things we look at are verifying security mechanisms. Knowledge of the language or framework is simply not necessary. If you know what you're doing, you can prove the lack of security engineering by testing the app in situ and then research why it fails. Once I find a weakness, I look at the code to see why the weakness exists. Once I've found the issue, I look further afield for the pattern and then I document the issue. Rarely does an app or framework have just one weakness - they are usually patterns.
Picking up a new language or grammar and framework, like going from Struts to Spring MVC takes about half a day for someone like me who knows multiple languages, both functional like Haskell, or OO languages like Smalltalk or Ada, or scripting dynamic languages like PHP, Ruby or Python, or declarative languages like C or Java. We do not write the app, we are reviewing the app.
Security mechanisms are usually fairly clear if they exist. If they do not make themselves immediately obvious, they are usually missing.
Folks who have the hubris to think their code is somehow safe, like the COBOL folks on the mainframe or your example of not reviewing code if you don't know it well. That's why I turned down the Haskell review as I didn't know it well enough in the time available. If it was a longer review, I would have taken it as I love to learn new languages.
However, fyi, if you paid me to be a developer, I could be immediately productive in the following languages:
J2EE - Since Java was first released. Major frameworks include Struts, type 1 JSP with JSTL, Spring MVC, Struts 2.0, and JSF
PHP - Since PHP 3
Could code if absolutely required:
COBOL - 12 months review only experience
RPG - 12 months review only experience
Perl - 15 years experience
Shell scripts - 15 years experience
Ruby with RoR - tested it out for a new version of my forum (UltimaBB/XMB) but it was too slow
C - since 1985. Co-wrote the Matrox millennium driver for XFree86 back in the day
C++ - since CFront was a bastard child
Ada - since 1990. Still have fond memories
Pascal - since 1985, haven't used it for a while
Languages that I don't suck at but wouldn't claim any particular skills:
Camel case sucks (Score:2, Insightful)
Bertrand Meyer
Object Oriented Software Construction, 2nd Ed., p. 881
Richard Stallman
GNU Coding Standards
Rob Pike
Notes on Programming in C
Linux Torvalds
Linux Kernel Coding Style
Patrick Lynch and Sarah Horton
Yale C/AIM Web Style Guide
The problem with java (Score:0, Insightful)
import inside here now system::ontology::basic::directions::fromAndTo::justToTestYourTyping::andYourNerves::To to;
towards::hardware::ui::screen::virtual::notMobile::notCLI where;
try::reallyHard::butItIsNP::4.times::atLeast:
system::interface::ui::utf::orLess::characters::ifFail(opticalRecognition) message;
message = "Java has no problems";
system::magic::lostMyYouth::expele::towards(to, where, message);
else:
system::core::shit::happens::throw::towards::withMessage("Whoops!");
}
From the article: (Score:3, Insightful)
okay, if you can't bother to learn more than 1 language, then you can't really call yourself a programmer.
There is Only 1 Rule: My Time is Important (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't give a crap if language xxxxxxx is more efficient, more hardcore, etc. You know why?
Because I don't want to spend a year writing an application in C for efficiency and find out at the end that for a mere $1,000 I could have written the same thing in Python in a month and just bought a faster computer 11 months later.
YOUR time is linear, while the computer's is exponential. You'd be a fool to not take advantage of that and, frankly, type safety, efficiency, platform independence, programming style, power, etc. etc. can all go to hell. Just give me a beautiful language.
Re:I don't really get the Java hate around here (Score:1, Insightful)
These things are all important factors when choosing an environment, but they are not the language.
A programming language is a tool for building abstractions -- that's its primary purpose. And Java fails pretty hard at this. No lambda, no root superclass, no multiple dispatch, no good meta system, no bignums (except through its standard library), no syntactic abstraction, and so on.
The Croquet Project started out using Java, but had to switch to Smalltalk because Java's meta system was simply too weak. In fact, Smalltalk is more internally consistent, and faster than Java initially (where do you think Hotspot came from?).
If you have a language which, in the early 1990's and for years after that, can best be described as "worse than Smalltalk [and old hacker favorite] in every way [including performance], except we wrote some neat classes for it", is it any wonder the hacker community holds it in such contempt?
Exercise for the reader: Write a language today which is just like Python, but semantically weaker, syntactically more verbose, less consistent, and slower, and push it to succeed purely by the marketing force of a big company. See how much love you get from hackers.
Re:Off the top of my head? (Score:4, Insightful)
Where the hell do you get C and bloat together? If anything written in C has bloat, the developer should be promoted away from coding immediatly.
COBOL a success? Why is this even a question? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is COBOL old? Certainly.
Is COBOL outdated? Yes.
Has COBOL since been replaced by better languages? Yep.
Would you be insane to start a new, large, application from scratch using COBOL? Of course.
But "Is COBOL a success?" Without doubt, yes. Countless millions (perhaps) billions of lines of production COBOL code are still in use. It is still the core behind many of the applications that run our day-to-day lives. These applications have been running for decades with downtime records that would put an average "Web 2.0" app to shame.
Certainly, IBM deserves a lot of credit for this, maintaining pure 100% backward compatibility for those apps for the last forty years or so, but some credit is due to the language itself.
SirWired
Assembly Language FTW (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Off the top of my head? (Score:3, Insightful)
The language situation is not good (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not a very good article. For one thing, measuring language use by search engine hits is silly. Just because it's the easiest way to get a number doesn't mean anything.
The current situation in programming languages isn't very good. It's been 52 years since Backus invented FORTRAN, and we still don't have it right. Let's look at what we've got.
So that's where we are. No really good hard-compiled language in wide use, and the major scripting languages each have some tragic flaw.
Re:Off the top of my head? (Score:5, Insightful)
As for banging out quick projects, I tend to do them in C or shell scripts because I know they will either become real projects or they need to be understood by all.
Also doing things in a scripting language and having C do the heavy lifting... sounds like Tcl, Lua, JavaScript. Python offers nothing new there.
Re:I don't really get the Java hate around here (Score:5, Insightful)
They're not very good (or weren't for a long time), they feel cobbled together at best. But they work. They're fast, have a low learning curve, they're accessible and essentially cheap and/or free. They're easy to deploy and shove into production fresh off the prototype phase.
They have large numbers of people who use them as their primary tools. A large percentage of these people are not exactly what you'd call professional developers (I am not a developer, but I've worked closely with them throughout my career), yet they get "the thing" done somehow, and those systems tend to stay up there driving business for a long time.
It's just funny that the very phenomenon that for years and years the platform and language purists argued was one of the Really Bad things about Windows is actually now coming to Linux in a big way. What those elitists never realized is that most developers just want to get the business of business done, cash a paycheck and go home to their families. They don't care that there are 19 different ways of escaping a string in the runtime library. No one cares about that, as long as the platform continues to deliver, even if it just sort of limps around.
All those thousands and thousands of clueless VB/Access/VBA developers don't suddenly become little Donald Knuths because they're looking at a KDE desktop and using Emacs to code curly braces in PHP.
Re:Off the top of my head? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yaml does the same thing with whites space and the power of it is really evident when you compare it to JSON or XML. indeed you can put XML and JSON or HTML right into YAML without doing anything other than indenting it. No quoting, escapes, etc. so the other code looks "native" to the reader not encoded.
So I totally understand your fear of it. But it's just not justified and you are missing out on a big deal in language enforced, clean coding style that pays big dividends.
Re:Off the top of my head? (Score:5, Insightful)
For instance, in my day to day life, I see a clear distinction as to when procedural/object oriented languages such as C, PHP, and Java should be used, and when a relational language like SQL should be used, and I rarely confuse those two classes of programming. Markup languages (though hardly programming languages) like HTML and CSS also have their essential and distinct roles. Were I forced to select only one, I'd probably quit programming!
Programming languages are just tools to get the job done. When was the last time you saw a carpenter with only a chisel?
Everybody's so quick to get into pissing matches.
(Forgive any flawed terminology, I was just speaking casually.)
Re:I don't really get the Java hate around here (Score:3, Insightful)
I was going to rant about how that was not true about C, but I stopped myself. C went through a bunch of iterations (AT&T, K&R, others still way before my time) before it became an ANSI standard.
So, I guess the lesson is to use a language that has stopped evolving. I can write POSIX code on a Windows box (Vista + Visual Studio 2005) and compile it and execute it on both Windows and Solaris. (The labs I had to do involved forking, signals, semaphores, and sockets.) With very few exceptions (our Solaris box evidently supported a pause() command) I could compile the same client/server code on both OSes with correct behavior.
Is Python still evolving? Is Java still evolving? I guess the lesson here is to stay away from them. C (and C++ especially) have a lot of nice libraries; if you have to hack a single line of Python out in a 1000 lines of C, save those thousand lines of C in a proper library and #include next time.
Then again, I'm also a "tools for jobs" kind of guy - I'd much rather write the one-line Python program than the 1000 line C program. But then again, is saving 999 lines of code worth the chance of it breaking in Python 2.6?
Re:Off the top of my head? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ruby is an order of magnitude lower in complexity compared to C++. Whereas Java continues to mix objects and immediate values (e.g., int and Integer types), Ruby has only objects. Java's mixed model has a cost when programming. You may reply that the immediate int gives you a speed and optimization advantage, and that is true, but it misses the point. Java gave up speed compared to C++ to make things easier on programmers, and Ruby simply continues in that vein. You can't criticize Ruby for continuing what Java accomplished to a much lesser degree.
There are numerous other examples - Ruby's iterators, for example, are a generation past what Java has to offer. You can find plenty to appreciate in Ruby vs. Java before you even start to talk about advanced language concepts like closures.
I hear only complacency in the above comment. You've learned a language well, and find it hard to imagine a better way. Well, your lack of imagination does not equal evidence.
Ada (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Back to Basic (Score:2, Insightful)
If you add in the time spent on prototyping and testing, python has saved us way more time and effort.
Regarding type checking and reliability... You need to read up on the idea of "duck typing", Python's philosophy is that actual types get in the way, it's protocols and interfaces that matter. And after 7 years of python programming, I'd have to agree with that philosophy.
All of the critical parts of our apps have had unittests written (which catch semantic glitches at a level typechecking never will)... We've actually spent some time _removing_ type checking from the system, and replacing those lines with hasattr(obj, "append") calls, or creating synthethic protocol tests, allowing our implementations of various inputs to be widely varying: Jython implementations, CPython objects, who cares, they all LOOK the same.
OTHO, maybe you're trolling.
"Python looks like Basic" indeed.
Out of all the languages, I would have
never been reminded of that one.
Javascript maybe (especially considering what prototype.js has going on)
Actionscript! (Score:1, Insightful)
My favourite language for quick&dirty app making is Actionscript/flash. No other language comes close in speedyness... You have a vector based paint & sound editing program that can read photoshop files & import just about anything from avi movies to mp3's right next to your code, powered by a nice library... and your app can run in a web page or as standalone on practically all platforms.
So if someone is about to make a new language, check out the flash system and improve on it - Actionscript sure has it's illnesses.
A combination of 5 things (Score:2, Insightful)
1) Development speed
2) High number of areas the language works well for
3) Low barrier to entry (ease to learn, expense and ease of setting up an initial dev environment to evaluate the language, community support...)
4) Available (cheap) Libraries
5) Industry Buzz
Re:Off the top of my head? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Off the top of my head? (Score:4, Insightful)
Haskel suddenly very popular ? - the hordes of VB programmers got woken up to the world of threads
Elbonia - you're late, now Elbonians ship spaghetti code back to the less muddy countries
What makes programming languages popular ? - libraries
Popularity (Score:3, Insightful)
Python 3000 still has FP concepts (Score:3, Insightful)
l = [int(x.strip()) for x in l.strip().split(',')]
This version is arguably *easier* to read than your map-and lambda-based example. Map and filter are pretty much superseded by list and generator comprehensions (in fact, generator comprehensions allow for transparent lazy evaluation and are heavily used in good Python frameworks). reduce() is easy to provide on your own if you really need it, since functions are fist-class objects in Python, but even so I agree with Guido that explicit accumulation loops are easier to read than most reduce() expressions.
The only thing that I could conceivably miss are lambda functions. They do occassionally make for tighter and more readable code, but locally defined closures serve the same purpose, so again, there is no loss of expressiveness.
Re:The "un-success" of a language (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Off the top of my head? (Score:4, Insightful)
C is perfectly capable of many of the most useful object oriented techniques. Objects with methods and locals, classes (instantiating objects from models), inheritance -- all of these are easily and efficiently implemented in C without library or compiler-generated overhead. All the while, the programmer can remain in complete control, and the application can remain fast and lightweight. You can't do everything; there are some object-oriented paradigms that don't fit, but frankly, they're not critical. The important parts are easily managed.
Re:I don't really get the Java hate around here (Score:3, Insightful)
My code compiled against 1.2 still runs fine in JDK 1.6 though. So I cannot call that horrible or anything.
Java Nukum Forever (Score:3, Insightful)
But that's not why Java is in no danger of dying. Like any other software technology, programming languages are subject to lockin, that combination of cultural habits and legacy installations that keeps software around long after it's. Languages seem to be more subject to lockin than other technologies: unless it's a total failure right out of the gate, it soon develops a culture that maintains it, and a big body of software that must be maintained, and is too expensive to rewrite in a more modern language.
Consider FORTRAN. It was the very first high-level language (1953) and is full of design mistakes that reflect a total ignorance of artificial linguistics and compiler design theory by its inventors. (Not the designers' fault, these fields hadn't been invented yet.) And yet it remains the language for heavy-duty numerical processing. A lot of hard science and engineering grad schools rebel when told to learn it, but learn it they do.
Ironic story: I was working for Sun's Java org in 1998, when a corporate reshuffle caused our group to be given responsibility for maintaining Sun's FORTRAN compiler. Everybody's response was: What? Why the heck do we even have a FORTRAN compiler? Answer, the people who buy high-end computers for science and engineering won't even look at your platform if it doesn't have a FORTRAN compiler.
So Java (and FORTAN) will live forever. And centuries from now, newbie programmers will be wondering about those weird classes that are used to handle standard input and output.
Re:I don't really get the Java hate around here (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Off the top of my head? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is much more to good programming languages than short code.
Re:Easy. (Score:2, Insightful)
Think the fourth consideration should instead be the agility of the language. How easy is it to write code orthogonally? Is there a convenient facility for writing unit and integration tests? Can builds and testing be easily automated?
In fact, I'm a little surprised I haven't seen this mentioned at all in this discussion.
Re:All Programming Languages Suck (Score:2, Insightful)
This is an often repeated claim of Erlang fanatics. The truth is that, in Erlang, the functions themselves are the states. To say that there are no side effects in Erlang is a lie. Functions affect other functions (states) and if they are called in the wrong order, bad things will happen. Another problem with Erlang and functional programming in general, is that it does not support fine-grain parallelism. There are a lot of highly useful things that cannot be properly parallelized without fine-grain parallel processing, things like search and sort routines (I am still waiting for an effective parallel quick sort routine in Erlang). A third problem with Erlang is that, like multithreading, it is not deterministic. Determinism an essential requirement of reliable software. In addition, functional programming is not intuitive and many programmers find it hard to get used ot. So you people in Sweden and at Ericsson should stop promoting Erlang as the solution to the parallel programming problem. It is not.
Re:Off the top of my head? (Score:3, Insightful)
If I'm going to bother with a language that requires an explicit compilation step and is more verbose, I might as well just use C++ and at least get the raw execution speed, lower memory requirements of C++, and easy distribution of the executables. If I'm willing to accept a language that runs more slowly and is harder to distribute to end users, why not just use something that's more concise, gives me a REPL and lets me iterate the development more quickly.
About the only feature from Java that I occasionally miss in C++ is reflection. But I find avoiding that usually keeps my architectures cleaner anyway.
Re:Off the top of my head? (Score:2, Insightful)
print "Hello World!\n" x 3;
Re:Off the top of my head? (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, it's an incremental improvement on what's come before. Many of the best things are. Python is mostly Tcl done better, without the odd parse semantics and with working OO in everywhere. It also incorporates some nice functional programming aspects, giving you the best of all worlds. The only thing that's actually *new* is probably the incredibly pure syntax; initially offputting perhaps, but really nice when you start using it. You make a lot fewer syntax-based errors because there just isn't enough syntax to trip over.
Bottom line, Python is the nicest way I've found of turning an algorithm into working code. I can and have read a specification and written out the python code and have it work first time, which is not an experience I've had with any other programming language.
bloat vs big (Score:5, Insightful)
Not every big library is bloated. It's only bloat if it has a poor size to functionality ratio.
For example libc is small, but it does not include XML parsing, HTTP support, SHA1 and MD5 sums, the ability to read compressed files etc. Sure there are libraries for that, but you have to pick and add them yourself. So libc is small not because it is amazingly efficient, but because it is limited in scope.
Personally, I like big standard libraries like Java and Python have. You pay for it in the initial install, but once that is in place, your application has access to a huge amount of functionality without having to add a lot of external dependencies.
Re:Smalltak is a huge success and also a failure (Score:2, Insightful)
No, I was saying Smalltalk is successful to me for some of the reasons I listed. I said it was not successful in terms of industry and popular terms. I don't think the 12+ language killers you are referring to are problems. Personally, those are likely the reasons I love the language.
Fileless language? Brilliant IMO and forces people to be organized in a structured way. VM? Great idea, makes deployment a snap, restore the state of your dev environment, etc. Need I remind you how VMs in general are all the rage now? Lack of extensive keywords? Makes it simple to learn and extend because the language is essentially written in itself, no weird dropping to C or other languages (see Ruby) causing all kinds of issues.
Outdated? It's updated more or less daily and even has several new web frameworks (just not 2.0 buzzword oriented like Ruby on Rails sorry, etc.).
Frankly, I find Smalltalk to be way ahead of the curve as far as keeping up with the rest of the pack in most areas because there are some great coders that share their stuff and churn it out quick, and the rest was already implemented in the past few decades anyway. How many times can we reinvent a datetime library? Lots of major changes != good language.
If you think no one ever used it, then you really lack an understanding of the language and its history. It's certainly more of a niche language than PHP, but it's not exactly an experimental research language either. I think you might be equating your own personal exposures to general usage.
In general, your first sentence sums it up. Smalltalk is successful because it implements both existing and new ideas well to the point where at least the ideas got more exposure, adoption, and notice. You can wrap all the features in a language you want, but the wrong blend makes it taste terrible. Smalltalk did quite a nice job and that's the reason people give it credit and other languages follow suit. Did you ever stop and think maybe there is a reason people give it credit? Note that I never claimed it was original as you pointed out.
As an aside, my favorite language for code reasons is actually Lisp, but I find developing in Smalltalk is much easier because of the philosophy and design on the language. I find Lisp more powerful, but less clear and about equally expressive for most things. I'd choose Lisp if I was going purely on language design, and Smalltalk for actual implementation from code to deployment. For me, Lisp tastes great but has a bit of an unwanted after taste in some areas. It's a personal thing.
Anyway, again, for me both Smalltalk and Lisp are successful because they help me do great work vs. other languages. I don't consider most popular languages successful because I'd rather die than write code in them, but unfortunately it's hard to escape reality when you're selling your services in the open market. I don't see how you can call Smalltalk a Sham unless you're trying to troll. All languages are good in some way, but we all have our preferences.
Re:The "un-success" of a language (Score:3, Insightful)