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programming languages history
440bx:
--- Quote from: marcov on June 02, 2022, 09:20:09 am ---I wonder why they got their data. IMHO the rise of C and Ada is a bit early in the mid eighties, and Ada is way to dominant.
--- End quote ---
I wondered where they got their data too. I know Ada enjoyed some popularity at one time but, I never got the impression that it was the #1 language out there.
Another "peculiarity" I found interesting is that they show "Delphi" as being a programming language and, a separate one from Pascal at that.
Popularity numbers have to be taken with a small "Himalayas sized" grain of salt (that should be enough salt for a while...)
MarkMLl:
--- Quote from: friend on June 02, 2022, 09:12:07 am ---P*thon, J*va, J*vaScript and similar types of manure, are at the top of the list. Damn all of them.
--- End quote ---
Careful please: we can do without unsubstantiated opinions which contribute to a flame war.
I've got an open mind on Java, and it must be admitted that both Java and Javascript have filled the role of "questionable prototypes" on which people have built improved versions.
As far as Python goes: it's a pragmatic solution as a "glue language", but I have personal reasons for disliking its "whitespace is significant" notation based on seeing somebody's business getting thoroughly screwed when they attempted to use that sort of thing as part of a data storage model. But I point out this from Ken Thompson:
--- Quote ---However, we have had extensive experience tracking down build and test failures caused by cross-language builds where a Python snippet embedded in another language, for instance through a SWIG invocation, is subtly and invisibly broken by a change in the indentation of the surrounding code. Our position is therefore that, although spaces for indentation is nice for small programs, it doesn't scale well, and the bigger and more heterogeneous the code base, the more trouble it can cause. It is better to forgo convenience for safety and dependability, so Go has brace-bounded blocks.
--- End quote ---
https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article
And I think that's a significantly important point to substantiate my revulsion :-)
MarkMLl
marcov:
--- Quote from: 440bx on June 02, 2022, 10:30:59 am ---
--- Quote from: marcov on June 02, 2022, 09:20:09 am ---I wonder why they got their data. IMHO the rise of C and Ada is a bit early in the mid eighties, and Ada is way to dominant.
--- End quote ---
I wondered where they got their data too. I know Ada enjoyed some popularity at one time but, I never got the impression that it was the #1 language out there.
--- End quote ---
The US DOD switched to ADA somewhere in the late eighties for a while. If it is some pre internet US job advertisement based index, that could explain a spike in interest, but even then there is a difference between using and starting a language. I know in France there are also still quite some Ada holdouts. (leftovers of France's Nuclear industry?).
Not even to speak of the fact that there is also a world outside of the USA. Quite some stats don't say anything, but only use US based stats.
But yeah, it is like the TIOBE index criticisms on steroids. I can't blame Tiobe about the USA stats thing, as they are apparently situated in the town where i live ;-)
MarkMLl:
--- Quote from: marcov on June 02, 2022, 09:20:09 am ---I wonder why they got their data. IMHO the rise of C and Ada is a bit early in the mid eighties, and Ada is way to dominant.
--- End quote ---
In my opinion, the significance of Ada- and for that matter things like OS/2 and mainframe OSes- has to be weighted by its overall significance in industry. Rather than the "easy metrics" of column-inches or "number of people I know who use it" a better gauge might be column-inches multiplied by the advertising rate of the journal etc. in which the piece is published.
By analogy, AutoCAD and CATIA don't get many column-inches in the sort of things that most of us read, and they have minimal presence on Sourceforge and Github. But from the POV of industry as a whole, they're /very/ significant.
--- Quote ---
Also C was rising to dominance when there wasn't even a bulk compiler for the Dos target, as Turbo C came in 1987 (according to Wikipedia, I never saw it in the wild) and Turbo C++ came only in 1990. Weird again.
That said, C wasn't on my radar in that period (other than on Unix), so I might have missed clues about its dos history.
--- End quote ---
C was pretty much dominant by '87. Grey Matter easily had a dozen affordable compilers in its catalogue, and library bundles were typically sold tailored for a specific compiler and (in the case of x86) memory model. Add to that the extreme importance of timesharing minicomputers etc. by that point: if a system was based on "a unix" then technical users were likely to believe that the only usable language was C which obviously had an impact on the "significance" metric.
MarkMLl
BlueIcaro:
I show that video this morning. I don't know why Delphi is called a lenguage. Delphi is a product, not a lenguage.
/BlueIcaro
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