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My biggest disagreement would be: The first 2 points are really bad arguments in my opinion, it's easy to see by imagining people saying this at the peak year

My biggest disagreement would be: The first 2 points are really bad arguments in my opinion, it's easy to see by imagining people saying this at the peak year of Fortran: "there's a ton of existing Fortran programs, other have tried to replace Fortran and failed" edit: (forgot to finish sentence) therefore, this new C language will never succeed 3 - I agree that community backing is very important, but in this case: Mozilla use of rust, and Google writing an entire OS in rust seems to prove that rust has a chance. 4 - this one chart used as evidence isn't very conclusive 5 - a language with that safety built-in the compiler itself is better in my opinion. I've read mixed reviews on the effectiveness of the c++ analysers. 6 - first I didn't think that unsafe Rust was there for that hypothetical 90%/10% rule, but more for interacting with unsafe libraries in C/C++? Second, even if that was true a mix of 2 languages completely ignores the marshalling needed between the two languages? 7 - ?? Not sure what the point was here 8 - one could complain similarly about verbosity in c++ templates. It would be sure nice to have some tooling support to refactor code if in such a situation of using the wrong pointers, but: do people really end up in a situation of 'Vec<Rc<RefCell<Box<Trait>>>>' ? Also, how's it different from making mistakes with "const" keywords in c++ and having to change the const qualifiers everywhere. Programmers mistakes will happen in any language, the more strongly typed , the less forgiving the compiler will be. 9 - cargo concerns could be valid, but c++ doesn't even have a cargo equivalent yet?

brobdingnagians 8y ago
Not disagreeing, more curious, but isn't Fortran still in relatively common use in Scientific computing? I haven't gotten into that domain, but I guess it is probably far below where it was at it's peak. Maybe it is just that we are getting lots of languages good for certain niches, instead of one general purpose language dominating multiple niches.
- fhrow4484 8y ago
  Yeah, I'm not expert on Fortran use back in those time, it's just more used as an example of a language that at one point in time was much more popular than another. For instance the amount of Fortran code and libraries in 1979 was probably order of magnitude bigger than the amount of C code. Was there more general purpose language that C was competing with back in the time? I guess picking C as the old language and C++ as the new would have make the example clearer :) But yeah I agree, and believe Fortran is still being used heavily in scientific computing!
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    > Was there more general purpose language that C was competing with back in the time? Plenty of Algol and PL/I variants. C had an almost free OS with source code going for it, had UNIX been a commercial offering right from the start with a price tag similar to systems like OS/360 or VMS, and the outcome would have been completely different.
- stochastic_monk 8y ago
  It sure is. My colleagues in Mech E and atmospheric science all write fortran. I imagine this is common for technically proficient fields which aren’t computer science or engineering but still need efficient solutions, making starting from scratch in a more modern language prohibitively expensive.
ori_b 8y ago
>The first 2 points are really bad arguments in my opinion, it's easy to see by imagining people saying this at the peak year of Fortran: "there's a ton of existing Fortran programs, other have tried to replace Fortran and failed" And they'd be right: At work, even our Android app written this year contains a huge amount of Fortran via scientific libraries.

brobdingnagians 8y ago

Not disagreeing, more curious, but isn't Fortran still in relatively common use in Scientific computing? I haven't gotten into that domain, but I guess it is probably far below where it was at it's peak. Maybe it is just that we are getting lots of languages good for certain niches, instead of one general purpose language dominating multiple niches.

fhrow4484 8y ago
Yeah, I'm not expert on Fortran use back in those time, it's just more used as an example of a language that at one point in time was much more popular than another. For instance the amount of Fortran code and libraries in 1979 was probably order of magnitude bigger than the amount of C code. Was there more general purpose language that C was competing with back in the time? I guess picking C as the old language and C++ as the new would have make the example clearer :) But yeah I agree, and believe Fortran is still being used heavily in scientific computing!
- pjmlp 8y ago
  > Was there more general purpose language that C was competing with back in the time? Plenty of Algol and PL/I variants. C had an almost free OS with source code going for it, had UNIX been a commercial offering right from the start with a price tag similar to systems like OS/360 or VMS, and the outcome would have been completely different.
stochastic_monk 8y ago
It sure is. My colleagues in Mech E and atmospheric science all write fortran. I imagine this is common for technically proficient fields which aren’t computer science or engineering but still need efficient solutions, making starting from scratch in a more modern language prohibitively expensive.

ori_b 8y ago

>The first 2 points are really bad arguments in my opinion, it's easy to see by imagining people saying this at the peak year of Fortran: "there's a ton of existing Fortran programs, other have tried to replace Fortran and failed" And they'd be right: At work, even our Android app written this year contains a huge amount of Fortran via scientific libraries.