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I have a few ideas, but the main one is that: independent of the language/semantics, languages only really take off because of a "killer app" use case where the

I have a few ideas, but the main one is that: independent of the language/semantics, languages only really take off because of a "killer app" use case where they are required. Once that's in place, tooling is built to make it much easier to complete projects in. As a few examples: Objective-C was only popular for years because it was required to write iOS apps. Ditto JavaScript being the only way to write for web. Ruby only got popular after Rails. C++ was the blessed way to write for Windows in the 90's. Java had a giant marketing budget, "write once, run everywhere," and was looking to be the best way to write for the web (lol applets). This isn't a perfect explanation, but in many of these cases, it wasn't about eager-vs-lazy, control flow constructs, variations in type systems, or anything related to what the language offered you, it was primarily necessity to be on the platform of your choice. After that, tooling evolved, and they became easier to write major projects in. Why write a web app in Erlang when the JVM has every major templating system, an implementation of CommonMark, several high-performance JSON libraries, model validation, several mature build systems, and thousands of Stack Overflow answers? This makes it hard for languages like Crystal or Nim to take off, but ON TOP OF THAT Prolog is asking its devs to completely change how they approach programming. What would it take to make Prolog take off? A killer app. Which, in the 80's, looked like it was AI :-p

hdhzy 9y ago
I think sometimes you don't even need the "killer app" when the language itself is "pure tooling" and there is a sufficient demand for tooling in a given market, see TypeScript that basically is "JavaScript with tooling".
protomyth 9y ago
PHP's killer app was that it was easy for a System Admin to install on Apache and easy for a programmer to upload something that worked.
- zmonx 9y ago
  ... for a quite generous definition of "worked". In comparison, writing web applications with SWI-Prolog is quite safe also thanks to the powerful quasi-quotation mechanism.
  - nickpsecurity 9y ago
    "... for a quite generous definition of "worked"." Barely. All kinds of people learned it quickly. They built web applications. It became a dominant web, application language. The momentum led to many improvements in its ecosystem and deficiencies. Prolog failed to do... any of that at PHP's scale.
    - zmonx 9y ago
      A language like PHP greatly increases the chance of security problems. There is ample evidence of such issues in practice. This is one consequence of the quite low-level way to reason about the available data, and a class of problems that does not arise so easily in Prolog. This is just one of many instances where barely working solutions are used, partly stemming from a lack of alternatives at that time. Robust web frameworks are only now becoming gradually available in Prolog!
      - nickpsecurity 9y ago
        PHP wasn't designed for secure web applications. Most of its users don't care about that. It thrives anyway. So, this isn't a failure of PHP. On contrary, the author cranking it out quickly might have been a reason for success. Now, someone wanting secure apps might not want PHP. They traditionally went with "safe" languages such as C# or Java whose runtimes were full of 0-days. They might find Ada, Component Pascal, or Rust with a web framework helpful. Even enterprise sector hasn't been writing most web pages is Ada, though. ;)
        zmonx 9y ago
        Why are you downvoting what I wrote? You are arguing against statements I did not make. PHP worked for many people in what I can only consider a quite generous definition of "worked", in tandem with countless security problems that arise almost necessarily from its low-level data representation. I am not arguing that this has impeded its adoption, that most users care about this, or that it does not "thrive". These are not signs that it works in the way I prefer software and languages to work. In particular, for writing secure web applications, I cannot recommend PHP. In the future, I expect to see more and more Prolog web applications. The necessary frameworks are now becoming available, with much better safety properties.

hdhzy 9y ago

I think sometimes you don't even need the "killer app" when the language itself is "pure tooling" and there is a sufficient demand for tooling in a given market, see TypeScript that basically is "JavaScript with tooling".

protomyth 9y ago

PHP's killer app was that it was easy for a System Admin to install on Apache and easy for a programmer to upload something that worked.

zmonx 9y ago
... for a quite generous definition of "worked". In comparison, writing web applications with SWI-Prolog is quite safe also thanks to the powerful quasi-quotation mechanism.
- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  "... for a quite generous definition of "worked"." Barely. All kinds of people learned it quickly. They built web applications. It became a dominant web, application language. The momentum led to many improvements in its ecosystem and deficiencies. Prolog failed to do... any of that at PHP's scale.
  - zmonx 9y ago
    A language like PHP greatly increases the chance of security problems. There is ample evidence of such issues in practice. This is one consequence of the quite low-level way to reason about the available data, and a class of problems that does not arise so easily in Prolog. This is just one of many instances where barely working solutions are used, partly stemming from a lack of alternatives at that time. Robust web frameworks are only now becoming gradually available in Prolog!
    - nickpsecurity 9y ago
      PHP wasn't designed for secure web applications. Most of its users don't care about that. It thrives anyway. So, this isn't a failure of PHP. On contrary, the author cranking it out quickly might have been a reason for success. Now, someone wanting secure apps might not want PHP. They traditionally went with "safe" languages such as C# or Java whose runtimes were full of 0-days. They might find Ada, Component Pascal, or Rust with a web framework helpful. Even enterprise sector hasn't been writing most web pages is Ada, though. ;)
      - zmonx 9y ago
        Why are you downvoting what I wrote? You are arguing against statements I did not make. PHP worked for many people in what I can only consider a quite generous definition of "worked", in tandem with countless security problems that arise almost necessarily from its low-level data representation. I am not arguing that this has impeded its adoption, that most users care about this, or that it does not "thrive". These are not signs that it works in the way I prefer software and languages to work. In particular, for writing secure web applications, I cannot recommend PHP. In the future, I expect to see more and more Prolog web applications. The necessary frameworks are now becoming available, with much better safety properties.