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> Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++. The good languages have been those that were designed f

• ksdnjweusdnkl21 4y ago
  Does a programming language have to live vibrantly for 3 decades to be "good"? I don't think so. Use it while it's good, then move on to or create the next good thing.
  • bborud 4y ago
    The longer it lives, the more your investment in learning thoroughly it pays off. But languages also have a tendency to accumulate features until taking on a cancer-ridden look. I probably stick to a given "main workhorse" language for about a decade on average. So I would agree that if a language gets a decade of being good, it is about as good as you can expect.
• karmakaze 4y ago
  With the exceptions of Perl and perhaps Ada, I still tend to agree with this. C++ is only okay because of the libraries that make it suck less. What the statement doesn't do is support the opinion that Java will be unpopular for being a bad language. The thing that made Java succeed was the write-once-run-everywhere JVM and the huge effort spent by Sun, IBM, and others to make the JVM as good as it is.
• bborud 4y ago
  Choice of programming language is almost always a decision of whether you want to stand alone, or whether you want to stand on the shoulders of the multitudes. Some of which are indeed geniuses. Standing alone is always a poor choice. Not understanding that means not understanding that programming is a highly social activity.