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Programming language adoption -- like the adoption of many technological products -- is usually really fast. With the possible sole exception of Python, all pro

by pron 4y ago

Programming language adoption -- like the adoption of many technological products -- is usually really fast. With the possible sole exception of Python, all programming languages, popular and unpopular alike, have reached the general ballpark (i.e. high/mid/low) of their all-time peak market share within 5-10 years. Dark horses are very, very rare.

crop_rotation 4y ago
In general you are correct. However, language adoption can skyrocket when some new library/framework arrives which has a compelling reason to switch (e.g. Rails for Ruby)
tokai 4y ago
I can't see how there should be a reliable pattern in language usage like that. Javascript is more used that ever - who knows were the all-time market share peak is - but we're well beyond your 5-10 year time frame. Could you name any languages that actually have this pattern? Julia maybe.
- pron 4y ago
  All languages, except possibly Python, have followed this patterns. Read my comment carefully: I said that virtually all languages reach their ballpark market share within 10 years. JS did reach its high market share ballpark within a decade.
  - tokai 4y ago
    I understand what you are writing. But it only holds for you because your idea of ballpark is exceedingly wide. It's doesn't hold at all for the usage numbers I look at without your socalled ballpark being several magnitudes.
    - pron 4y ago
      JS's market share did not grow by even one order of magnitude since ~2006 nor even close to an order of magnitude. There aren't that many orders of magnitude for a share to grow if you start counting at ~1%.
  - dsrw 4y ago
    Essentially nobody was a "JavaScript Developer" in 2005, 10 years after JS's release. JQuery didn't exist yet, the term "AJAX" hadn't been coined, and NodeJS was years away. Web developers were using JS to enhance pages, but it wasn't a language that was widely used to write applications. I don't know what the popularity numbers looked like so I'm not saying you're wrong, but it was definitely closer to 15 years before people started to take JS seriously. JS aside, I think there's probably some survivorship bias going on here. I don't think there are a lot of 15 year old, relatively unpopular languages that are still under active development. Maybe it's not that languages that don't become popular in 10 years never will, but rather that languages that don't become popular in 10 years tend to be abandoned by their developers, thus sealing their fate.
    - pron 4y ago
      JS was a very popular language in 2006 (at least in the top 10 if not top 5) -- a lot of people were doing at least some JS development -- even though it grew bigger later. Nevertheless, JS (like Objective-C and Swift) is indeed special in the sense that it's the "monopoly language" for a particular platform. > I don't think there are a lot of 15 year old, relatively unpopular languages that are still under active development. There are quite a few. If you look in virtually any language ranking, places 10-40 have many 10 year-old and even 15 year-old language. Here are some continuously developed >=15yo languages that are less-than-middling-popular and have always been so: Common Lisp, Racket, Clojure, OCaml, SML/NJ, F#, TCL, Haskell, Idris, Groovy, Squeak, Erlang, D, Ada, Nim. There are more of these than there are super-popular languages. (I didn't include any language that was, at one time, at least somewhat popular but is no longer, such as Visual Basic, Delphi, and Perl 5). There might still be survivorship bias, but I am not saying all that is fate, just a clear historical observation.
fluoridation 4y ago
C++ was designed in the late '70s-early 80's and reached peak popularity in the mid-to-late '90s. JavaScript appeared in the mid-'90s and didn't see broad adoption until about the '10s. I would say that the norm is for peak adoption to happen at around the 10-15 year mark of original release. Languages that get adopted faster than 7 years are unusual, and it indicates that they came out at highly opportune times to address specific needs. I'm thinking in particular of Java and Rust, for example, which both reached critical masses of adoption very quickly.
- pron 4y ago
  C++ was released in 1985 and it neared its peak market share by much closer than a ballpark in its first decade. JS did the same. > Languages that get adopted faster than 7 years are unusual, and it indicates that they came out at highly opportune times to address specific needs. Not only is it not unusual, over hundreds of languages I think there has really been one exception (for 10 years; maybe not 7). At age 10 how well a language does is more or less how well it's ever going to do. I am not saying this is a prediction, but it has been the case historically with almost no exceptions. Any language has the chance to buck this trend, but it has been the trend.
  - fluoridation 4y ago
    JS took well over 10 years to reach massive popularity. C++ took a bit over 10.
    - pron 4y ago
      That's a definite no on either one. JS was very popular (top 5-10) in 2006 and C++ was very close to its peak popularity in 1995 (and already declining five years later). Maybe Ruby took 11 years, but that's close enough. Over scores or even hundreds of languages, I think Python is the only clear exception. It wasn't unpopular in 2005 (it was in the top 20), but it certainly moved up a rank from middling popularity to super-popularity well after 10 years old.
zem 4y ago
ocaml managed, but it took a significant effort to improve the general tooling ecosystem

by pron 4y ago

crop_rotation 4y ago

In general you are correct. However, language adoption can skyrocket when some new library/framework arrives which has a compelling reason to switch (e.g. Rails for Ruby)

tokai 4y ago

I can't see how there should be a reliable pattern in language usage like that. Javascript is more used that ever - who knows were the all-time market share peak is - but we're well beyond your 5-10 year time frame. Could you name any languages that actually have this pattern? Julia maybe.

pron 4y ago
All languages, except possibly Python, have followed this patterns. Read my comment carefully: I said that virtually all languages reach their ballpark market share within 10 years. JS did reach its high market share ballpark within a decade.
- tokai 4y ago
  I understand what you are writing. But it only holds for you because your idea of ballpark is exceedingly wide. It's doesn't hold at all for the usage numbers I look at without your socalled ballpark being several magnitudes.
  - pron 4y ago
    JS's market share did not grow by even one order of magnitude since ~2006 nor even close to an order of magnitude. There aren't that many orders of magnitude for a share to grow if you start counting at ~1%.
- dsrw 4y ago
  Essentially nobody was a "JavaScript Developer" in 2005, 10 years after JS's release. JQuery didn't exist yet, the term "AJAX" hadn't been coined, and NodeJS was years away. Web developers were using JS to enhance pages, but it wasn't a language that was widely used to write applications. I don't know what the popularity numbers looked like so I'm not saying you're wrong, but it was definitely closer to 15 years before people started to take JS seriously. JS aside, I think there's probably some survivorship bias going on here. I don't think there are a lot of 15 year old, relatively unpopular languages that are still under active development. Maybe it's not that languages that don't become popular in 10 years never will, but rather that languages that don't become popular in 10 years tend to be abandoned by their developers, thus sealing their fate.
  - pron 4y ago
    JS was a very popular language in 2006 (at least in the top 10 if not top 5) -- a lot of people were doing at least some JS development -- even though it grew bigger later. Nevertheless, JS (like Objective-C and Swift) is indeed special in the sense that it's the "monopoly language" for a particular platform. > I don't think there are a lot of 15 year old, relatively unpopular languages that are still under active development. There are quite a few. If you look in virtually any language ranking, places 10-40 have many 10 year-old and even 15 year-old language. Here are some continuously developed >=15yo languages that are less-than-middling-popular and have always been so: Common Lisp, Racket, Clojure, OCaml, SML/NJ, F#, TCL, Haskell, Idris, Groovy, Squeak, Erlang, D, Ada, Nim. There are more of these than there are super-popular languages. (I didn't include any language that was, at one time, at least somewhat popular but is no longer, such as Visual Basic, Delphi, and Perl 5). There might still be survivorship bias, but I am not saying all that is fate, just a clear historical observation.

fluoridation 4y ago

C++ was designed in the late '70s-early 80's and reached peak popularity in the mid-to-late '90s. JavaScript appeared in the mid-'90s and didn't see broad adoption until about the '10s. I would say that the norm is for peak adoption to happen at around the 10-15 year mark of original release. Languages that get adopted faster than 7 years are unusual, and it indicates that they came out at highly opportune times to address specific needs. I'm thinking in particular of Java and Rust, for example, which both reached critical masses of adoption very quickly.

pron 4y ago
C++ was released in 1985 and it neared its peak market share by much closer than a ballpark in its first decade. JS did the same. > Languages that get adopted faster than 7 years are unusual, and it indicates that they came out at highly opportune times to address specific needs. Not only is it not unusual, over hundreds of languages I think there has really been one exception (for 10 years; maybe not 7). At age 10 how well a language does is more or less how well it's ever going to do. I am not saying this is a prediction, but it has been the case historically with almost no exceptions. Any language has the chance to buck this trend, but it has been the trend.
- fluoridation 4y ago
  JS took well over 10 years to reach massive popularity. C++ took a bit over 10.
  - pron 4y ago
    That's a definite no on either one. JS was very popular (top 5-10) in 2006 and C++ was very close to its peak popularity in 1995 (and already declining five years later). Maybe Ruby took 11 years, but that's close enough. Over scores or even hundreds of languages, I think Python is the only clear exception. It wasn't unpopular in 2005 (it was in the top 20), but it certainly moved up a rank from middling popularity to super-popularity well after 10 years old.

zem 4y ago

ocaml managed, but it took a significant effort to improve the general tooling ecosystem