|
complaints ∝ usage: There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses. Bjarne Stroustrup tl;dr they want to make things better
Languages are like products in a market that solve a problem. Many factors, product and non-product, make it hard to predict. e.g. do people know about it? how easy is it to get started? has a core vocal and influential group picked it up? How exactly does it solve the problem? Can it be enhanced or bandaided so it's workable for problems that it almost fixes?But worse than products, languages are high-tech products. This makes them harder to evaluate, so the bandwagon effect is even stronger (oh, smarter-than-me guy says this is cool, I'll believe it). That makes it even more unpredictable. But worse than high-tech products, there are network effects: it matters hugely how many other people are using it... because they make libraries which makes it even better. They also use your libraries, making it more attractive. That is, a language is a market, itself. This makes it more unpredictable again. Finally, why do people make new languages? Well, there is real progress in language design. People just want to make things better. For example, Go is written by the C guys... they want to make it better. (NB: no guarantee of success! those guys also wrote unix, and tried to improve it with Plan 9. "What's Plan 9?", you ask curiously. Exactly.) Of course, the big companies with money also want to capture developers, instead of sharing, so instead of one language with the cool new features, you have several. Just like in most markets, when there's an improved style of product. EDIT what about smalltalk, lisp, haskell? partly it's the bandwagon effect that passed these by... partly it's the purity of a cool idea. This makes them attractive to idealists, and unattractive to pragmatists. e.g. homoiconicism is a very elegant idea, but awkward, complex, unintuitive - everything is sacrificed to its pure beauty. These are like indie artists who haven't sold out. |