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My personal opinion is what killed most very good languages is the "elite" and "math" aspect of them. By elite I mean people who thought they were so much supe
by d0m 11y ago
My personal opinion is what killed most very good languages is the "elite" and "math" aspect of them.
By elite I mean people who thought they were so much superior to everyone else (And they were!), that they'd left the beginners and inexperienced programmers out of the discussions and decisions. But guess what, high level people who make decisions aren't always the best programmers, so C++ won because they had better sales people and were more beginners and sales friendly.
By "Math", I mean that most functional books and tutorials used to only focus on physics or maths aspect of the language, or AI.. whereas the languages who seemed to have won the war (Think Perl, PHP at the time, or Python/Ruby) were much more practical in how the language can be used to solve day-to-day pragmatic problems.
I think it's changing.. and it's really nice to see amazing concepts from LISP in the mainstream/hipsters languages..
- coldtea 11y ago>so C++ won because they had better sales people and were more beginners and sales friendly. Actually C++ is far worse for beginners than Smalltalk (which is casually used as a teaching language to kids, as Squeek etc). The comment about "math" and "elite" show no familiarity with Smalltalk or the environment back then. What you say might be true for Haskell, or even CL, but it doesn't have anything to do with Smalltalk.
- mscharrer 11y agoI really like C++, but I think it mainly won because it was friendly to the huge number of programmers that already had years of experience with C at the time. Easy use of existing C projects was also a huge benefit.