[marvinalone]

The _only_ factor to programming language popularity is how accessible it is.

Beauty and elegance don't matter. Performance doesn't matter. In fact, no measure of "fitness for purpose" matters.

If Malbolge was built into every operating system, Stack Overflow would plug the gaps, and major production systems would be built in it. People would give conference talks about "scaling Malbolge to millions of transactions per second". It would have a package manager, a deep learning framework, and several UI toolkits.

In some sense, this has already happened.

[wtetzner]

> The _only_ factor to programming language popularity is how accessible it is.

> Beauty and elegance don't matter. Performance doesn't matter. In fact, no measure of "fitness for purpose" matters.

If that were true, C++ wouldn't be so popular.

[dnautics]

C++ was very much more accessible than the alternatives (mostly Turbo Pascal) in the late 90s. As devs started moving to unix it became the most accessible option in the landscape (not counting C, which I would argue is in a different market) with djgpp, g++, etc.

[slx26]

Yeah, I think a better approach would be to state that a language popularity is determined by how much it makes you think that you can do useful things with it (even if it's a mistaken perception). Accessibility is pretty related, but this kinda explains C++ better, as it was "the language" used for all "serious" and "high performant" software, and therefore seen as the way to go for a lot of people. It was also what was used in a lot of other software you had to interact with, so in a sense that made it more accessible too: if you had to use it anyway, why not just stick with it all the way.

[Hemospectrum]

The popularity of C++ took off at a time when its competition was C. Not modern C, but C89 and older. Oceans of ink have been spilled describing the quality-of-life improvements that early C++ made over contemporary C. It is only with hindsight that we see how flawed these improvements were, and how other languages might achieve them with more elegance (and fewer corner cases that constantly explode in your face).

[_y5hn]

C++ is relatively easy to code in a plain way that don't blow up in your face. It's just that java made much more business sense with GC, stack trace, safe objects and built-in security model.

[dnautics]

> It is only with hindsight that we see how flawed these improvements were

I think some platforms existed that had already solved those issues, but it was a different time. Disseminating those ideas was harder, open source wasn't as much of a thing yet, so development was siloed, we didn't have blogs or youtube to aggregate and broadcast the danger of those footguns, and it was the evolutionary solution that did provide the most QOL improvements.

[tachyonbeam]

I agree. C++ offers a fairly good compromise between performance, low-level control and convenience. C++ strings and vectors, classes, make it much easier to implement a number of things in C++ than in C. The popularity of C++ is very much a matter of fitness for purpose.

You could write code in D or Nim, and your code might be marginally more readable, but you wouldn't have as many easily available libraries, or as much support (eg: stack overflow). It's hard to compete with the fairly good compromise that C++ offers.

[vinceguidry]

That's just silly. Once ONLY-TRAIT-THAT-MATTERS is satisfied, by more than one solution, then NEXT-TRAIT-THATS-IMPORTANT suddenly starts mattering.

[ouid]

is this a dig at python?

[marvinalone]

also JavaScript and PHP

edit: and Bash and VBA

[CyberDildonics]

If that was true, powershell would dominate programming.

[Jtsummers]

Yeah, it's not just presence but centrality to experience.

Powershell is still peripheral to most Windows' user's experiences. If they script anything on Windows, it's probably via VBA and MS Office. And even many sysadmins (IME, I know this is changing) seem to default to BAT files out of habit.

Contrast with shell on * nix, where it is more commonly used and known (even if not to writing fluency, most * nixers could probably read a shell script thrown at them barring poorly formatted/structured code). BASIC's popularity was largely due to its centrality to the user experience on early PCs, with many PCs starting in a prompt where BASIC could be entered directly. If it had been hidden away behind several menus and options, it would have been less popular.

Javascript's popularity is similarly due to its centrality to the experience with web browsers, and the ability to run it on anyone's computer without needing to compile and publish anything beyond the code itself (and an HTML page to show it off on).

EDIT: Asterisks ate themselves, edited to put a space between them and "nix(ers)"

[michaelmrose]

Windows 1.0 was released in 1987. Powershell didn't exist until 2006 after Microsoft had promoted a succession of other tech for 19 years including building their own development tools designed to make building guis easy.

It would also be hard for anyone to mistake powershell or a replacement for existing tools.