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>Why is a coin toss any more random than a specific language gaining traction? It's called "(extreme) sensitivity to initial conditions." Many of which are neit
by batista 14y ago
>Why is a coin toss any more random than a specific language gaining traction? It's called "(extreme) sensitivity to initial conditions." Many of which are neither observable nor predictable.
Because my argument was not about a "specific" language.
It was about C-capability language gaining and Lisp-capability language losing ground at that era.
That the C-capability language was C itself, well, that be more or less random.
But that people DID need a portable, close to the metal, constrained with regards to memory use, pointer using, simple to create compilers for, close to assembly language at the time because CPUs and memory were constrained, that was not random, that was a necessity.
And, no, there wasn't "extreme sensitivity to initial conditions" to that. The initial conditions varied at the ten odd years it took for the language to gain traction. And Lisps (including CL, Clojure etc) have been going up and down since the early sixties. It's not like some initial condition set the tone, tons of decisions, several of them important and with predictable consequences set the tone.
- KirinDave 14y ago> It was about C-capability language gaining and Lisp-capability language losing ground at that era. And why didn't Fortran win? It meets these requirements. Didn't Forth exist back then too? That meets these requirements.
- batista 14y agoPerhaps you missed the part of my comment where I SPECIFICALLY addressed that issue. That is, the part where I wrote: my argument was not about a "specific" language. It was about C-capability language gaining and Lisp-capability language losing ground at that era. That the C-capability language was C itself, well, that be more or less random. Either the languages competing were close to what was needed for the machines of the era and the dynamics of the marker (in which case they were more or less similar and which one won was random) or the languages had very different characteristics (in which case which "style" of languages won can be explained). Languages close together (e.g C and Pascal) won or lost for less significant and more random reasons than the ones that led whole language families to win or lose.