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It is interesting that so many of the largest languages were developed in a couple year time frame in the early-mid 90s. Python, Javascript, Java, Lua, R. All o

It is interesting that so many of the largest languages were developed in a couple year time frame in the early-mid 90s. Python, Javascript, Java, Lua, R. All of these were developed 91-95 and make a bulk of development today.

kqr 1y ago
Languages developed in that time matured just as good binary package managers started popping up, is my pet theory. Before that, getting a development environment for a new language was serious work, and people did things like stick to Perl since it happened to be installed already.
- kanbankaren 1y ago
  Not true. I was programming in the 90s when these languages emerged. Developments environments were emacs, vi, Brief, Borland IDE, etc. There were a few other IDEs available, but about $200 per seat. All the scripting languages mentioned didn't come as default in Unix or Windows. You had to download from their own websites. It was mostly Visual Basic, C, COBOL that were popular.
  - kqr 1y ago
    I think that's what I mean. After the time you talk about ('90s), these languages matured, and they happened to mature around the same time binary package managers became a thing, i.e. in the early-to-mid '00s.
  - DonHopkins 1y ago
    There was also ELK Scheme, the Extension Language Kit, a scheme interpreter designed to be used as an extension language for other appllications. https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/compsystems/1994/fall_laumann.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/compsystems/1994/... >Elk, the Extension Language Kit, is a Scheme implementation that is intended to be used as a general, reusable extension language subsystem for integration into existing and future applications. Applications can define their own Scheme data types and primitives, providing for a tightly-knit integration of the CIC++ parts of the application with Scheme code. Library interfaces, for example to the UNIX operating system and to various X window system libraries, show the effectiveness of this approach. Several features of Elk such as dynamic loading of object files and freezing of fully customized applications into executables (implemented for those UNIX environments where it was feasible) increase its usability as the backbone of a complex application. Elk has been used in this way for seven years within a locally-developed ODA-based multimedia document editor; it has been used in numerous other projects after it could be made freely available five years ago. Also Gnu Guile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Guile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Guile >GNU Ubiquitous Intelligent Language for Extensions[3] (GNU Guile) is the preferred extension language system for the GNU Project[4] and features an implementation of the programming language Scheme. Its first version was released in 1993.[1] In addition to large parts of Scheme standards, Guile Scheme includes modularized extensions for many different programming tasks.[5][6] Also Winterp, which used XLisp: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/121994.121998 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/121994.121998 >Winterp is an interactive, language-based user-interface and application-construction environment enabling rapid prototyping of applications with graphical user interfaces based on the OSF/Motif UI Toolkit. Winterp also serves as a customization environment for delivered applications by providing a real programming language as an extension language. Many existing user-interface languages only have the expressive power to describe static layout of user interface forms; by using a high-level language for extensions and prototyping, Winterp also handles the dynamic aspects of UI presentation, e.g. the use of direct manipulation, browsers, and dialog. Winterp makes rapid prototyping possible because its language is based on an interpreter, thereby enabling interactive construction of application functionality and giving immediate feedback on incremental changes.Winterp's language is based on David Betz's public domain Xlisp interpreter which features a subset of Common Lisp's functionality. The language is extensible, permitting new Lisp primitives to be added in the C language and allowing hybrid implementations constructed from interpreted Lisp and compiled C. Hybrid implementation gives Winterp-based applications the successful extension and rapid-prototyping capabilities of Lisp-based environments, while delivering the multiprocessing perfor- mance of C applications running on personal Unix workstations. And TCL/Tk of course! https://www.tcl-lang.org/ https://www.tcl-lang.org/ And on the commercial side, there was Visix Galaxy, which was extensible in PostScript, inspired by NeWS: https://www.ambiencia.com/products.php https://www.ambiencia.com/products.php https://0-hr.com/Wolfe/Programming/Visix.htm https://0-hr.com/Wolfe/Programming/Visix.htm https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.java.programmer/c/LPkz9Z9sUl0 https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.java.programmer/c/LPkz... https://donhopkins.com/home/interval/pluggers/galaxy.html https://donhopkins.com/home/interval/pluggers/galaxy.html https://wiki.c2.com/?SpringsAndStruts https://wiki.c2.com/?SpringsAndStruts >The Visix Galaxy project was a ridiculously overpriced and overfeatured portable GraphicalUserInterface. You could do things like swivel an entire panel full of their custom widgets 32 degrees clockwise, and it would render all its text at this new angle without jaggies. The company went out of business after gaining only a handful of customers. For USD$ 10,000 a seat they sure didn't see the OpenSource movement coming. Their last attempt before going under was (guess what?) a Java IDE. Galaxy competed with Neuron Data Systems in the "cross platform gui framework" space (which got steamrolled by the web permanently and for a window of time Java): https://donhopkins.com/home/interval/pluggers/neuron.html https://donhopkins.com/home/interval/pluggers/neuron.html Here is a great overview of User Interface Software and Tools by Brad Myers: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/2001spring/lecture05toolsintro.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/2001spring/lecture05too... https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/toolnames/ https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/toolnames/ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hQbMwK_iyjX-wpu_Xw_H-3zLIgcHxWViyMvYO7mDuFg/edit?tab=t.0 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hQbMwK_iyjX-wpu_Xw_H-3zL...
exographicskip 1y ago
Don't forget Ruby in 1995!
- giraffe_lady 1y ago
  PHP too.
r2ob 1y ago
True
kragen 1y ago
I think that's an illusion. The language of R is S, which originated at Bell Labs in 01976. Python began development in 01989, although Guido didn't release it until 01991. And the top 20 on https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ are Python, C (01972?), C++ (01982?), Java, C# (01999? though arguably it's just a dialect of Java), JS, Visual Basic (first released 01991, within your window), Golang (02007), Delphi (under this name in 01995 but a dialect of Object Pascal from 01986, in turn a dialect of Pascal, from 01970), SQL (01973), Fortran (01957), Perl (01987), R, PHP (01995, within your window!), assembly (01947), Rust (02006), MATLAB/Octave (01984), Scratch (! 02003), Ada (01978?), and Kotlin (02011). By decade, that's one language from the 40s, one language from the 50s, no languages from the 60s, 5 languages from the 70s, 5 languages from the 80s, 4 languages from the 90s, 3 languages from 0200x, one language from the 02010s, and no languages from the 02020s. Lua is #33 on TIOBE's list, but given its prevalence in Roblox (as Luau), WoW, and other games, I suspect it should be much higher. For some reason, CUDA (a dialect of C++) and shader languages like GLSL don't show up in the list at all. — ⁂ — I think most of what's going on here is that it takes a new language a long time to get good, and it takes a new good language a long time to get popular. Perl, Python, Java, PHP, and JS became popular because of the Web; https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/server-programming https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/server-programming explains why Perl, Python, and PHP did, and of course Java and JS became popular because they were the only languages you could make interactive web pages in: > You would think that picking a Web site development language would be trivial. Obviously the best languages are safe and incorporate powerful object systems. So let's do everything in Common Lisp or Java. Common Lisp can run interpeted as well as compiled, which makes it a more efficient language for developers. So Common Lisp should be the obvious winner of the Web server language wars. Yet nobody uses Common Lisp for server-side scripting. Is that because Java-the-hype-king has crushed it? No. In fact, to a first approximation, nobody uses Java for server-side scripting. Almost everyone is using simple interpreted languages such as Visual Basic, PHP, Perl, or Tcl. > How could a lame string-oriented scripting language possibly compete in power with systems programming languages? Well, guess what? The only data type that you can write to a Web browser is a string. And all the information from the relational database management system on which you are relying comes back to to the Web server program as strings. So maybe it doesn't matter whether your scripting language has an enfeebled type system.
munificent 1y ago
It is an interesting observation! I'm sure there are a few unrelated factors going on to influence that plus some inadvertent cherry-picking. But I do think there is a thing to the observation too. If I had to make a guess, I'd point to a combination of: 1. This was right around the time that computers were fast enough to afford the runtime cost of garbage collection while still delivering usable apps. The GC languages before the 90s (Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk, Self) had reputations for abysmal performance and have largely (but not entirely) died out. 2. This was also the boom of the Internet and web which shifted a lot of computation to server-side after the PC boom had shifted it client-side. That also enabled somewhat slower languages with GC to thrive because first-mover advantage was more valuable than using your servers efficiently. You could just throw more hardware at it. 3. That boom also created a huge influx of new developers who picked up whatever language happened to be hot at the time. And once they had, they tended to stick with it. I can't find a good graph of the number of software engineers over time but I'd bet that there's a noticeable uptick around the dotcom boom.
- ecshafer 1y ago
  After mulling it over a bit, plus seeing a few other response (Php, Ruby, etc) I think the internet is the reason. C, C++, Ada, Basic, Fortran. Those were written assuming they were going to be writing systems code and numerical code. There is then some inertia keeping the most successful ones of from those periods going in their spaces. Then these new languages with new ideas (GCs, Dynamic Typing, etc) they came out and became successful in the newer Web and Application spaces. Now why they won out and not LISP or SmallTalk or what have you, I am not sure. But my hypothesis is that the web is a big part of it.
pjmlp 1y ago
Java 1996, C++ only got standardized in 1998, C in 1990 (tehcnically the standard is from 1989, but there was a short retification in 1990), Delphi is from 1995 (not that big player nowadays, but plenty of its influences live on C#, Typescript and Kotlin). It goes to show how much investment is required for a programming language to actually take off at scale. However in a couple of years, we will be asking the computers to perform tasks for us and the actually compiler frontend will be irrelevant to the AI runtime.

kqr 1y ago

Languages developed in that time matured just as good binary package managers started popping up, is my pet theory. Before that, getting a development environment for a new language was serious work, and people did things like stick to Perl since it happened to be installed already.

kanbankaren 1y ago
Not true. I was programming in the 90s when these languages emerged. Developments environments were emacs, vi, Brief, Borland IDE, etc. There were a few other IDEs available, but about $200 per seat. All the scripting languages mentioned didn't come as default in Unix or Windows. You had to download from their own websites. It was mostly Visual Basic, C, COBOL that were popular.
- kqr 1y ago
  I think that's what I mean. After the time you talk about ('90s), these languages matured, and they happened to mature around the same time binary package managers became a thing, i.e. in the early-to-mid '00s.
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  There was also ELK Scheme, the Extension Language Kit, a scheme interpreter designed to be used as an extension language for other appllications. https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/compsystems/1994/fall_laumann.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/compsystems/1994/... >Elk, the Extension Language Kit, is a Scheme implementation that is intended to be used as a general, reusable extension language subsystem for integration into existing and future applications. Applications can define their own Scheme data types and primitives, providing for a tightly-knit integration of the CIC++ parts of the application with Scheme code. Library interfaces, for example to the UNIX operating system and to various X window system libraries, show the effectiveness of this approach. Several features of Elk such as dynamic loading of object files and freezing of fully customized applications into executables (implemented for those UNIX environments where it was feasible) increase its usability as the backbone of a complex application. Elk has been used in this way for seven years within a locally-developed ODA-based multimedia document editor; it has been used in numerous other projects after it could be made freely available five years ago. Also Gnu Guile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Guile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Guile >GNU Ubiquitous Intelligent Language for Extensions[3] (GNU Guile) is the preferred extension language system for the GNU Project[4] and features an implementation of the programming language Scheme. Its first version was released in 1993.[1] In addition to large parts of Scheme standards, Guile Scheme includes modularized extensions for many different programming tasks.[5][6] Also Winterp, which used XLisp: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/121994.121998 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/121994.121998 >Winterp is an interactive, language-based user-interface and application-construction environment enabling rapid prototyping of applications with graphical user interfaces based on the OSF/Motif UI Toolkit. Winterp also serves as a customization environment for delivered applications by providing a real programming language as an extension language. Many existing user-interface languages only have the expressive power to describe static layout of user interface forms; by using a high-level language for extensions and prototyping, Winterp also handles the dynamic aspects of UI presentation, e.g. the use of direct manipulation, browsers, and dialog. Winterp makes rapid prototyping possible because its language is based on an interpreter, thereby enabling interactive construction of application functionality and giving immediate feedback on incremental changes.Winterp's language is based on David Betz's public domain Xlisp interpreter which features a subset of Common Lisp's functionality. The language is extensible, permitting new Lisp primitives to be added in the C language and allowing hybrid implementations constructed from interpreted Lisp and compiled C. Hybrid implementation gives Winterp-based applications the successful extension and rapid-prototyping capabilities of Lisp-based environments, while delivering the multiprocessing perfor- mance of C applications running on personal Unix workstations. And TCL/Tk of course! https://www.tcl-lang.org/ https://www.tcl-lang.org/ And on the commercial side, there was Visix Galaxy, which was extensible in PostScript, inspired by NeWS: https://www.ambiencia.com/products.php https://www.ambiencia.com/products.php https://0-hr.com/Wolfe/Programming/Visix.htm https://0-hr.com/Wolfe/Programming/Visix.htm https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.java.programmer/c/LPkz9Z9sUl0 https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.java.programmer/c/LPkz... https://donhopkins.com/home/interval/pluggers/galaxy.html https://donhopkins.com/home/interval/pluggers/galaxy.html https://wiki.c2.com/?SpringsAndStruts https://wiki.c2.com/?SpringsAndStruts >The Visix Galaxy project was a ridiculously overpriced and overfeatured portable GraphicalUserInterface. You could do things like swivel an entire panel full of their custom widgets 32 degrees clockwise, and it would render all its text at this new angle without jaggies. The company went out of business after gaining only a handful of customers. For USD$ 10,000 a seat they sure didn't see the OpenSource movement coming. Their last attempt before going under was (guess what?) a Java IDE. Galaxy competed with Neuron Data Systems in the "cross platform gui framework" space (which got steamrolled by the web permanently and for a window of time Java): https://donhopkins.com/home/interval/pluggers/neuron.html https://donhopkins.com/home/interval/pluggers/neuron.html Here is a great overview of User Interface Software and Tools by Brad Myers: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/2001spring/lecture05toolsintro.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/2001spring/lecture05too... https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/toolnames/ https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/toolnames/ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hQbMwK_iyjX-wpu_Xw_H-3zLIgcHxWViyMvYO7mDuFg/edit?tab=t.0 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hQbMwK_iyjX-wpu_Xw_H-3zL...

exographicskip 1y ago

Don't forget Ruby in 1995!

giraffe_lady 1y ago
PHP too.

r2ob 1y ago

True

kragen 1y ago

I think that's an illusion. The language of R is S, which originated at Bell Labs in 01976. Python began development in 01989, although Guido didn't release it until 01991. And the top 20 on https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ are Python, C (01972?), C++ (01982?), Java, C# (01999? though arguably it's just a dialect of Java), JS, Visual Basic (first released 01991, within your window), Golang (02007), Delphi (under this name in 01995 but a dialect of Object Pascal from 01986, in turn a dialect of Pascal, from 01970), SQL (01973), Fortran (01957), Perl (01987), R, PHP (01995, within your window!), assembly (01947), Rust (02006), MATLAB/Octave (01984), Scratch (! 02003), Ada (01978?), and Kotlin (02011). By decade, that's one language from the 40s, one language from the 50s, no languages from the 60s, 5 languages from the 70s, 5 languages from the 80s, 4 languages from the 90s, 3 languages from 0200x, one language from the 02010s, and no languages from the 02020s. Lua is #33 on TIOBE's list, but given its prevalence in Roblox (as Luau), WoW, and other games, I suspect it should be much higher. For some reason, CUDA (a dialect of C++) and shader languages like GLSL don't show up in the list at all. — ⁂ — I think most of what's going on here is that it takes a new language a long time to get good, and it takes a new good language a long time to get popular. Perl, Python, Java, PHP, and JS became popular because of the Web; https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/server-programming https://philip.greenspun.com/panda/server-programming explains why Perl, Python, and PHP did, and of course Java and JS became popular because they were the only languages you could make interactive web pages in: > You would think that picking a Web site development language would be trivial. Obviously the best languages are safe and incorporate powerful object systems. So let's do everything in Common Lisp or Java. Common Lisp can run interpeted as well as compiled, which makes it a more efficient language for developers. So Common Lisp should be the obvious winner of the Web server language wars. Yet nobody uses Common Lisp for server-side scripting. Is that because Java-the-hype-king has crushed it? No. In fact, to a first approximation, nobody uses Java for server-side scripting. Almost everyone is using simple interpreted languages such as Visual Basic, PHP, Perl, or Tcl. > How could a lame string-oriented scripting language possibly compete in power with systems programming languages? Well, guess what? The only data type that you can write to a Web browser is a string. And all the information from the relational database management system on which you are relying comes back to to the Web server program as strings. So maybe it doesn't matter whether your scripting language has an enfeebled type system.

munificent 1y ago

It is an interesting observation! I'm sure there are a few unrelated factors going on to influence that plus some inadvertent cherry-picking. But I do think there is a thing to the observation too. If I had to make a guess, I'd point to a combination of: 1. This was right around the time that computers were fast enough to afford the runtime cost of garbage collection while still delivering usable apps. The GC languages before the 90s (Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk, Self) had reputations for abysmal performance and have largely (but not entirely) died out. 2. This was also the boom of the Internet and web which shifted a lot of computation to server-side after the PC boom had shifted it client-side. That also enabled somewhat slower languages with GC to thrive because first-mover advantage was more valuable than using your servers efficiently. You could just throw more hardware at it. 3. That boom also created a huge influx of new developers who picked up whatever language happened to be hot at the time. And once they had, they tended to stick with it. I can't find a good graph of the number of software engineers over time but I'd bet that there's a noticeable uptick around the dotcom boom.

ecshafer 1y ago
After mulling it over a bit, plus seeing a few other response (Php, Ruby, etc) I think the internet is the reason. C, C++, Ada, Basic, Fortran. Those were written assuming they were going to be writing systems code and numerical code. There is then some inertia keeping the most successful ones of from those periods going in their spaces. Then these new languages with new ideas (GCs, Dynamic Typing, etc) they came out and became successful in the newer Web and Application spaces. Now why they won out and not LISP or SmallTalk or what have you, I am not sure. But my hypothesis is that the web is a big part of it.

pjmlp 1y ago

Java 1996, C++ only got standardized in 1998, C in 1990 (tehcnically the standard is from 1989, but there was a short retification in 1990), Delphi is from 1995 (not that big player nowadays, but plenty of its influences live on C#, Typescript and Kotlin). It goes to show how much investment is required for a programming language to actually take off at scale. However in a couple of years, we will be asking the computers to perform tasks for us and the actually compiler frontend will be irrelevant to the AI runtime.