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> Languages invented by enthusiastic geeks can succeed, but they don't take over the world. Ruby, Python, and Lua are all obvious counter-examples to the idea

> Languages invented by enthusiastic geeks can succeed, but they don't take over the world. Ruby, Python, and Lua are all obvious counter-examples to the idea that enthusiastic geeks cannot create languages that are many orders of magnitude more successful than SmalllTalk and Scheme. Even CoffeeScript, if you can call it a complete language, is in the realm of that success. The only language that has come out recently that is successful purely because of the backing of a large company is Swift.

cwp 11y ago
Actually, those are the very languages I had in mind. Perl too. Yes, they have many more active developers than Smalltalk. But you know what? I was part of the Ruby community before Rails, and it was tiny. That was after it had been around for 10 years. So I'll say it again. If you want to create a new language, go for it! But I wouldn't sneer at Smalltalk and Scheme in the process. Those communities are relatively small, but they're still huge compared to your brand-new language, and they will be for decades. And if you judge language success by innovation and influence rather than developers... well, you have even bigger shoes to fill.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >Actually, those are the very languages I had in mind. Perl too. Yes, they have many more active developers than Smalltalk. But you know what? I was part of the Ruby community before Rails, and it was tiny. That was after it had been around for 10 years. So? Languages might take a while to catch on. Ruby has a huge community and lots of jobs now. And Python has had that even without something like Rails to dominate adoption. Perl was also huge back in the day. As a counterexample Dart is nowhere near even Ruby pre-Rails was, even though it's from a major vendor. And of course C, C++ etc didn't succeed because they had the backing of a major vendor, like Java or C# did.
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    > And of course C, C++ etc didn't succeed because they had the backing of a major vendor, like Java or C# did C - AT&T, UNIX vendors C++ - Almost all C compiler vendors adopted it. CORBA and Windows Development helped it.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      Having support from third party vendors is not the same as succeeding because you have the backing of a major vendor (and especially one who created you), like Java or C# or Swift.
      - pjmlp 11y ago
        C would have been a footnote in the history of programming languages if AT&T didn't offered the code to a few universities, whose students created the UNIX workstations like in Sun's case. In the late 80's the language had zero value in the hobbyist world. The few compilers that existed generated crappy code, were not even K&R compatible and only mattered to those that had access to UNIX either at work or university.
      - skissane 11y ago
        C was invented at Bell Labs, a subsidiary of AT&T. Surely that counts as "backing of a major vendor"? C spread along with UNIX, which AT&T as vendor licensed to many other companies. It was also helped along by AT&T's own use of C and UNIX in its internal systems, especially telephone switch development.
rbehrends 11y ago
Ruby, Python, and Lua were all created in the early nineties, when the alternatives were Tcl and Perl. And it still required each of them a decade or more to take off. This was also at a time when most programming languages did not have free implementations and companies actually sold compilers and interpreters. The programming language landscape was totally different back then.
Itaxpica 11y ago
> The only language that is successful purely because of the backing of a large company is Swift. Rust and Go seem to fall pretty firmly in to that category as well.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  I wouldn't really call Rust isn't successful yet, though it showing signs that it may become that way. Go, maybe, its at least farther along the path.
coldtea 11y ago
>The only language that has come out recently that is successful purely because of the backing of a large company is Swift. We don't know that. I mean it's not like ObjC, where the main pusher and motivation to adopt it was Apple having it for OS X (as evident by the relative lack of adoption of ObjC in Linux, NextStep etc). Swift does have got people genuinely interested to use it even outside the Apple ecosystem, they just don't have the chance to, yet.
ljw1001 11y ago
don't capitalize the T. Just Smalltalk. It's cleaner

cwp 11y ago

Actually, those are the very languages I had in mind. Perl too. Yes, they have many more active developers than Smalltalk. But you know what? I was part of the Ruby community before Rails, and it was tiny. That was after it had been around for 10 years. So I'll say it again. If you want to create a new language, go for it! But I wouldn't sneer at Smalltalk and Scheme in the process. Those communities are relatively small, but they're still huge compared to your brand-new language, and they will be for decades. And if you judge language success by innovation and influence rather than developers... well, you have even bigger shoes to fill.

coldtea 11y ago
>Actually, those are the very languages I had in mind. Perl too. Yes, they have many more active developers than Smalltalk. But you know what? I was part of the Ruby community before Rails, and it was tiny. That was after it had been around for 10 years. So? Languages might take a while to catch on. Ruby has a huge community and lots of jobs now. And Python has had that even without something like Rails to dominate adoption. Perl was also huge back in the day. As a counterexample Dart is nowhere near even Ruby pre-Rails was, even though it's from a major vendor. And of course C, C++ etc didn't succeed because they had the backing of a major vendor, like Java or C# did.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  > And of course C, C++ etc didn't succeed because they had the backing of a major vendor, like Java or C# did C - AT&T, UNIX vendors C++ - Almost all C compiler vendors adopted it. CORBA and Windows Development helped it.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Having support from third party vendors is not the same as succeeding because you have the backing of a major vendor (and especially one who created you), like Java or C# or Swift.
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      C would have been a footnote in the history of programming languages if AT&T didn't offered the code to a few universities, whose students created the UNIX workstations like in Sun's case. In the late 80's the language had zero value in the hobbyist world. The few compilers that existed generated crappy code, were not even K&R compatible and only mattered to those that had access to UNIX either at work or university.
    - skissane 11y ago
      C was invented at Bell Labs, a subsidiary of AT&T. Surely that counts as "backing of a major vendor"? C spread along with UNIX, which AT&T as vendor licensed to many other companies. It was also helped along by AT&T's own use of C and UNIX in its internal systems, especially telephone switch development.

rbehrends 11y ago

Ruby, Python, and Lua were all created in the early nineties, when the alternatives were Tcl and Perl. And it still required each of them a decade or more to take off. This was also at a time when most programming languages did not have free implementations and companies actually sold compilers and interpreters. The programming language landscape was totally different back then.

Itaxpica 11y ago

> The only language that is successful purely because of the backing of a large company is Swift. Rust and Go seem to fall pretty firmly in to that category as well.

dragonwriter 11y ago
I wouldn't really call Rust isn't successful yet, though it showing signs that it may become that way. Go, maybe, its at least farther along the path.

coldtea 11y ago

>The only language that has come out recently that is successful purely because of the backing of a large company is Swift. We don't know that. I mean it's not like ObjC, where the main pusher and motivation to adopt it was Apple having it for OS X (as evident by the relative lack of adoption of ObjC in Linux, NextStep etc). Swift does have got people genuinely interested to use it even outside the Apple ecosystem, they just don't have the chance to, yet.

ljw1001 11y ago

don't capitalize the T. Just Smalltalk. It's cleaner