4 ms·

I think the second reason is probably more important. What languages were pushed by a big company but weren't a primary interface to a platform? The only ones

by chubot 7y ago

I think the second reason is probably more important. What languages were pushed by a big company but weren't a primary interface to a platform? The only ones I can think of are Java and C#, which are very big languages, but combined they're dwarfed by these languages, which follow the second rule: C (Unix), C++ (compatible with C), JavaScript (browser), Objective C (OS X and iOS), Kotlin (Android), bash (first program to run on the Linux kernel)

user5994461 7y ago
C# is a primary interface to the Windows platform. Java is a primary interface to the Android platform (2008). When it was originally made decades ago (1996), it was supposed to be the first language for cross platform development (compile once run anywhere), it may not be one platform per se but it is equivalent in a way.
- chubot 7y ago
  Yeah it's true that C# gives you more access to Windows than any other language, e.g. for GUIs and such. Java became popular without Android, but Sun was very much a platform company (Solaris -- they just didn't succeed in the long term.) So basically the point is that the first reason is a special case of the second... Marketing alone does a little bit for a language, but having the platform is more important. People choose platforms and not languages. Big companies are the ones that own platforms (Linux being an exception).
  - user5994461 7y ago
    Oh right almost forgot about Solaris. ^^ I don't recall Solaris ever being any significant, so must have been a good argument that Java could run on the many Unix/Linux variants besides Solaris.
    - samatman 6y ago
      Solaris was huge, in the US at least, in the 90s. I learned Unix and C on a SparcStation, and to this day I prefer workstations to other computers. Even if Apple is the only one still making them...
      - wbl 6y ago
        When a desktop rivals some servers for power the workstation is dead.
ken 6y ago
Sure, you can swap the relative importance of those factors if you like. My point is that an expert's concept of "quality" is not indicative of market success -- in programming languages, or any other. The 25 best-selling albums of the year are probably not the 25 best musicians, either. But I'll try to answer anyway: Go. Dart. Maybe Rust (depending on whether nonprofits count). Delphi. All of these are in the TIOBE top 25 today. Furthermore, languages like Kotlin, Swift, and C# became a primary interface to their respective platforms, but didn't necessarily start out that way. They got popular, and then became first-class platform citizens. It may have been the plan for them to eventually become that from the start, but I would claim they would have become popular even without the platform. So I put them in the first group. You can write Windows programs in C# today, and many developers do, but I bet even more are using it for web development. And in a popularity contest (Zipf's Law), losing even half of your fans won't change your list position much.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Go, Dart are pushed by Google, another big company. Delphi was pushed by Borland, the InteliJ from the 90's, everyone doing indie development on MS-DOS and Windows early days was using Borland compilers, not Microsoft's. Most Web development with C# is done on Windows anyway.

by chubot 7y ago

user5994461 7y ago

C# is a primary interface to the Windows platform. Java is a primary interface to the Android platform (2008). When it was originally made decades ago (1996), it was supposed to be the first language for cross platform development (compile once run anywhere), it may not be one platform per se but it is equivalent in a way.

chubot 7y ago
Yeah it's true that C# gives you more access to Windows than any other language, e.g. for GUIs and such. Java became popular without Android, but Sun was very much a platform company (Solaris -- they just didn't succeed in the long term.) So basically the point is that the first reason is a special case of the second... Marketing alone does a little bit for a language, but having the platform is more important. People choose platforms and not languages. Big companies are the ones that own platforms (Linux being an exception).
- user5994461 7y ago
  Oh right almost forgot about Solaris. ^^ I don't recall Solaris ever being any significant, so must have been a good argument that Java could run on the many Unix/Linux variants besides Solaris.
  - samatman 6y ago
    Solaris was huge, in the US at least, in the 90s. I learned Unix and C on a SparcStation, and to this day I prefer workstations to other computers. Even if Apple is the only one still making them...
    - wbl 6y ago
      When a desktop rivals some servers for power the workstation is dead.

ken 6y ago

Sure, you can swap the relative importance of those factors if you like. My point is that an expert's concept of "quality" is not indicative of market success -- in programming languages, or any other. The 25 best-selling albums of the year are probably not the 25 best musicians, either. But I'll try to answer anyway: Go. Dart. Maybe Rust (depending on whether nonprofits count). Delphi. All of these are in the TIOBE top 25 today. Furthermore, languages like Kotlin, Swift, and C# became a primary interface to their respective platforms, but didn't necessarily start out that way. They got popular, and then became first-class platform citizens. It may have been the plan for them to eventually become that from the start, but I would claim they would have become popular even without the platform. So I put them in the first group. You can write Windows programs in C# today, and many developers do, but I bet even more are using it for web development. And in a popularity contest (Zipf's Law), losing even half of your fans won't change your list position much.

pjmlp 6y ago
Go, Dart are pushed by Google, another big company. Delphi was pushed by Borland, the InteliJ from the 90's, everyone doing indie development on MS-DOS and Windows early days was using Borland compilers, not Microsoft's. Most Web development with C# is done on Windows anyway.