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Please stop making accusations. It's obvious that being better is not a sufficient condition for being popular. It's obvious that C and JavaScript are popular n

Please stop making accusations. It's obvious that being better is not a sufficient condition for being popular. It's obvious that C and JavaScript are popular now primarily due to entrenchment. I'm not saying that there were no "better" languages by the standards you mean. What I'm saying is that none of them were better enough. They needed to amass such a large number of pros so as to outweigh that one single con of not being the entrenched language for the niche that we're speaking about. This goes for ISAs too: We use x86 not because it's better or even good. It's because PowerPC (or whatever you prefer) and all those that were better were not better enough to outweigh the massive cost of losing backward compatability, training, habits, relevant capital and all of that. Maybe RISC V, paired with the right microarchitecture, actually does turn out to be so much better that the transition becomes worth that huge cost. We'll see. We will overcome C, JavaScript, x86 and all that but only once the contenders to displace them are just *that* much better. Many things have had the chance to do that and were better in many ways but not until recently has the balanced tipped, in my opinion.

hnlmorg 5y ago
> Please stop making accusations. It's obvious that being better is not a sufficient condition for being popular. I'm not making accusations. You literally said: > That's definitely true but I think the odds are that at least one of them would have succeeded if many of them really were competitive. They got a lot of chances. Which is the opposite of the point you're now making. I can only respond to the message you post. Any way, I think we are largely in agreement even if we're describing the problem from different angles.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  When you say I'm missing the point, confounding things or making the opposite point, you're making accusations. Both of my points are congruent. Rephrase the quote with "competitive" replaced with "better enough" and this becomes obvious. Your original points were that competitive (i.e. better enough) languages existed and people just got sick of C. I disagreed saying that no, if there had been competitive (i.e. better enough) languages then at least one of them would have succeed by now as they'd all had plenty of chances. Another argument against this "sick of C" idea is that if that were really true then any of the old languages could have been adopted, now that people are supposedly suddenly sick of C. But that's not what's happening. The new languages are being adopted because they're finally better enough. The old languages aren't being adopted because they were never competitive.

hnlmorg 5y ago

> Please stop making accusations. It's obvious that being better is not a sufficient condition for being popular. I'm not making accusations. You literally said: > That's definitely true but I think the odds are that at least one of them would have succeeded if many of them really were competitive. They got a lot of chances. Which is the opposite of the point you're now making. I can only respond to the message you post. Any way, I think we are largely in agreement even if we're describing the problem from different angles.

guerrilla 5y ago
When you say I'm missing the point, confounding things or making the opposite point, you're making accusations. Both of my points are congruent. Rephrase the quote with "competitive" replaced with "better enough" and this becomes obvious. Your original points were that competitive (i.e. better enough) languages existed and people just got sick of C. I disagreed saying that no, if there had been competitive (i.e. better enough) languages then at least one of them would have succeed by now as they'd all had plenty of chances. Another argument against this "sick of C" idea is that if that were really true then any of the old languages could have been adopted, now that people are supposedly suddenly sick of C. But that's not what's happening. The new languages are being adopted because they're finally better enough. The old languages aren't being adopted because they were never competitive.