| The market decides if a language has any value. It is not implying in any way that there is a 1:1 between popularity and quality (or any defined relationship for that matter). I think that would be ridiculous. It is not meant as any means to grade or rank one language against the other. Only to say that a language has some value. Rereading your comments I do not necessarily agree that the assumption is that market chooses based on quality. The market chooses based on perceived value which definitely takes into account quality but is not based entirely on it. The implication being is that if there is truly no value or the value is so low that consumers are no longer willing to consume the product. Then the product will disappear or get replaced by a better and cheaper alternative. In a way, it is simply saying, if someone uses a language then it has value -- at the very least -- to that person. I guess the underlying message is: do not assume that because something doesn't have value to you that it is not valuable. If it didn't have any value it would (IFF the theory is correct -- I'm not saying it definitely is!) cease to be used. I am anxiously awaiting your reply. If you have a good one, I might have to concede that the theory is disprove and/or incomplete. |
This restated thesis could be 100% true and it still wouldn't mean that the dominant programming language isn't the worst one ever invented.
And a language with nonzero value could still be effectively worthless — if Language A is worth 1 Foo, Language B is worth 10000 Foo and Language C is worth 15000 Foo, then choosing Language A means you lose more (relative to the others) than you gain.