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Yes, by many metrics. They might no be the best academically perfect languages, but they both have been hugely resilient, influential, and/or successful, which

Yes, by many metrics. They might no be the best academically perfect languages, but they both have been hugely resilient, influential, and/or successful, which is a good metric for considering what's "best". like JS? Is it a best language? C and lisp are very different examples of success - one has been dominant in business for decades and one was very influential but isn't really a business success today. Those are hugely different metrics - are you talking about popularity or core language design? If you expand the definition for success that wide, then yeah, you'll find that all "successful" languages fit your standard because you don't have a very useful standard. Yes, and PHP is also very good for what it does, with huge adoption and powering over 30% of the web. Yes, but knowing pg's stance on blub, he probably wouldn't agree. But that's the issue with the claim - PG didn't really expand on it so you have no idea what he really means. The fact of the matter is we simply don't have that many examples of successful languages. Maybe n < 29 which means that every example we pick of "this is how language design works" is choosing from a very small sample, perhaps not representative of anything and all successful due to various factors. Not a good way to make "rules".

coldtea 10y ago
>like JS? Is it a best language? Not as much. But JS is the opposite of what PG describes in 2 ways: 1) It didn't grow out by people with a need to develop some specific app, and it wasn't organically designed to serve such use. It was created with a top-down dictum by someone who didn't write, and didn't have to write, web apps himself, and in fact at a time where web apps weren't even a thing: it was created for light behavioral scripting. And it gets even worse, as some higher-ups even influenced its syntax (again by dictum): "make it look like Java". 2) Similarly, JS didn't survive and thrived as some evolutionary selected best way to serve the web. It survived as the only way to serve the web, period. So we can't say if its success is not anything else that it having been forced upon everybody + the success of the web in general. >Yes, but knowing pg's stance on blub, he probably wouldn't agree. No so sure. Actually IIRC PG used Perl along with Lisp in Viaweb later days [1]? Not that far from PHP as far as elegance is concerned, but he knew it was a good tool for the job. ("Viaweb at first had two parts: the editor, written in Lisp, which people used to build their sites, and the ordering system, written in C, which handled orders. The first version was mostly Lisp, because the ordering system was small. Later we added two more modules, an image generator written in C, and a back-office manager written mostly in Perl.")

coldtea 10y ago

>like JS? Is it a best language? Not as much. But JS is the opposite of what PG describes in 2 ways: 1) It didn't grow out by people with a need to develop some specific app, and it wasn't organically designed to serve such use. It was created with a top-down dictum by someone who didn't write, and didn't have to write, web apps himself, and in fact at a time where web apps weren't even a thing: it was created for light behavioral scripting. And it gets even worse, as some higher-ups even influenced its syntax (again by dictum): "make it look like Java". 2) Similarly, JS didn't survive and thrived as some evolutionary selected best way to serve the web. It survived as the only way to serve the web, period. So we can't say if its success is not anything else that it having been forced upon everybody + the success of the web in general. >Yes, but knowing pg's stance on blub, he probably wouldn't agree. No so sure. Actually IIRC PG used Perl along with Lisp in Viaweb later days [1]? Not that far from PHP as far as elegance is concerned, but he knew it was a good tool for the job. ("Viaweb at first had two parts: the editor, written in Lisp, which people used to build their sites, and the ordering system, written in C, which handled orders. The first version was mostly Lisp, because the ordering system was small. Later we added two more modules, an image generator written in C, and a back-office manager written mostly in Perl.")