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> Clearly nobody has stumbled on a big win or one particular language would start dominating the industry due to the productivity bump. This is what happened w
by bccdee 6y ago
> Clearly nobody has stumbled on a big win or one particular language would start dominating the industry due to the productivity bump.
This is what happened with Python. It provided a distinct productivity advantage over C & C++, and now no one writes web apps in C++ anymore. Granted, it's not just Python anymore, but newer languages learned from Python's success.
- gameswithgo 6y agoGarbage collection got a clear productivity gain over not garbage collection. But it isn't clear that the various takes on GC languages, Python, Java, C#, Go etc have led to any one clear winner.
- ska 6y ago> Python, Java, C#, Notably, we've had garbage collection for nearly as long as we've had programming languages - so this has been going on much longer than the examples you give would suggest.
- bccdee 6y agoI'd argue that Java ultimately failed to innovate over C++ in the way that Python did. It added GC, but it's still clunky and hard to work with. In that sense, it's more of a pre-Python language, even though it's a few years younger than Python.
- jokethrowaway 6y agoFirst we had web apps written in Java, then Perl, PHP. Python's popularity for web app development came way later (django was released in 2005)
- bccdee 6y agoPython was originally written as a reaction to C & C++. It didn't really hit the mainstream for web apps until much later, granted, but when we compare it to the languages it was originally competing against, the difference is pretty clear.