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by RcouF1uZ4gsC 2489 days ago
>Does this mean that the use of the language is more important than the language itself?

The answer is a resounding yes. C became popular because it is the native language of Unix. It was Rails that made Ruby popular. JavaScript is popular because it is implemented by all the browsers. Objective-C became popular because of iOS, and similarly with Swift. Visual Basic was one of the most popular languages for a time because it made Windows GUI programming easier. The ecosystem and use of a language is far more important than the language itself.
2 comments
braythwayt 2488 days ago
You quote a question about “importance,” then make a number of statements about popularity, then conclude something about importance.

It appears that you equate the two. And yet, others may have other definitions of “importance.” For example, Arguments can be made that Lisp, Smalltalk, and Haskell all have importance far greater than their popularity would indicate.

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gowld 2488 days ago
Objective-C became popular because it was the Mac language.
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DonHopkins 2488 days ago
In the pedantic sense, Objective-C became popular because it was the NeXT language. But by the numbers, its massive popularity was due to the iOS app store gold rush, not NeXT STEP or MacOS or OS/X.
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