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Language popularity has little to do with language semantics, and everything to do with runtime support. JavaScript is the world's most popular language. Why?

Language popularity has little to do with language semantics, and everything to do with runtime support. JavaScript is the world's most popular language. Why? The web browser became the most popular application runtime in the world, and the only language supported by the browser natively for those applications is JavaScript. Why is C the dominant language for systems programming? Because all operating systems used by the entire world are built on C. If we were using Lisp machines everyone would be using Lisp. If browsers used a Haskell API instead of JavaScript API then we'd all be using Haskell.

kazinator 8y ago
Why are operating systems built on C, though? C actually has merit, that's why. 1993 Donald Knuth interview: http://tex.loria.fr/historique/interviews/knuth-clb1993.html http://tex.loria.fr/historique/interviews/knuth-clb1993.html "I think C has a lot of features that are very important. The way C handles pointers, for example, was a brilliant innovation; it solved a lot of problems that we had before in data structuring and made the programs look good afterwards. C isn't the perfect language, no language is, but I think it has a lot of virtues, and you can avoid the parts you don't like."