4 ms·
I'm assuming by success you mean some adoption, like top 20 languages maybe? Marketing is, of course, necessary for that, but far from the whole story. Because
by zzzcpan 7y ago
I'm assuming by success you mean some adoption, like top 20 languages maybe? Marketing is, of course, necessary for that, but far from the whole story. Because we also had Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby that don't fit your explanation. It's just more complicated, the language competes with other languages, has to somewhat address some of the obvious easy to understand problems of competing languages and be not scarily unfamiliar, but easy to pick up, and so on.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago> Because we also had Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby that don't fit your explanation. That is why I specifically called out compiled languages. Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby are all interpreted languages. For some reason, interpreted languages seem to be able to do ok without a big company backing them, but compiled languages seem need a big company to back them.
- akavi 7y agoI think the distinction is between statically typed and dynamically typed languages, which for other reasons lines up with compiled vs. interpreted. A lot of the benefit of statically typed languages are the tooling around them (IDE integration/autocomplete/error messages). These represent a fairly expensive (resource wise) area of investment and so the resources of a large company has high ROI.