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I don't buy the basic premise that CL is too large. Languages get popular if they allow programmers to achieve what they want to achieve with minimum effort. It
by jonathanstrange 5y ago
I don't buy the basic premise that CL is too large. Languages get popular if they allow programmers to achieve what they want to achieve with minimum effort. It doesn't matter whether they are large or small. CL never had many good GUI options (except very expensive commercial implementations) and until recently many programmers wanted to create GUI applications. So CL was a bad choice. It's still a big minus. CL lacked a good package manager, which was very inconvenient. Now that there is Quicklisp, a big plus. CL has no concurrency support in the language and the quasi-standard Bordeaux-threads has disadvantages over concurrency primitives of other languages.
Here you go, three reasons why CL is less popular than it could be that have nothing to do with the size of the language, and these are just examples. A language doesn't need to be big but it needs to offer what programmers need in one way or another. It's irrelevant whether that's part of the language or part of an ecosystem.
- satellite2 5y ago> Languages get popular if they allow programmers to achieve what they want to achieve with minimum effort. It doesn't matter whether they are large or small For any sufficiently large organisation or lasting use cases a language is almost not at all about writing it but about reading it. Any subsequent modifications after the initial creation will require reading and hopefully understanding what is happening. Even if the code is properly documented the code is always the final specification and if you can't read, you can't understand what your organisation is really doing. In that sense, adding a feature that is possibly detrimental to reading the language means detrimental to the whole language and its users.
- jonathanstrange 5y agoI'm a big fan of Ada, and of all languages I've seen it is by far the most readable. It has been deliberately and carefully designed to be self-documenting. The Ada developers shared your vision. But it's also the reason why I don't think it's true that readability plays a major role in language adoption.
- andi999 5y agoAdas problem was that an open source version with a gpl linker exception came out too late.
- adamc 5y agoBased on experience... Perl 5 <cough>. Or PHP, in other ways. This is very true, and is one of the reasons our workplace moved to Python. Readability is very, very important.
- _wldu 5y agoI think one reason C (and to a lesser extent Go) is so popular is that it is small and easy for programmers to hold in their heads.
- p_l 5y agoA big reason for C popularity was that for many, it came free with OS, especially in university. In environment with less "language X is shipped by default", it had much less impact except for crossing over of developers who did work with it on other platforms (which is how Turbo Pascal/Delphi kept on significant marketshare in PC space for a long time).
- zozbot234 5y agoYup, gwbasic and qbasic shipped by default on most PC's, and this didn't exactly hurt their popularity. Similarly, one reason JS is so incredibly popular today is that you can start hacking stuff in it with just notepad and a web browser.
- adamc 5y agoIt also became popular because in the 1980s it was a way of wringing decent performance out of x86 machines (then becoming popular) without having to write everything in assembler.
- pjmlp 5y ago
- ngcc_hk 5y agoYes. These are my struggle to use that language. Some problem is better use js, python, c … etc.