I'm sympathetic to raganwald's overall argument, but "scripting language" is pretty meaningless if you call Java a scripting language, let alone others in this

I'm sympathetic to raganwald's overall argument, but "scripting language" is pretty meaningless if you call Java a scripting language, let alone others in this thread calling Ada and Fortran scripting languages. I follow Erik Meijer's view on programming language success [1] - In real life, programming language success is based on the perceived crisis divided by the perceived pain of adoption. Successful languages such as JavaScript, C, Java, or Ruby introduced solutions to real problems, and they have relatively low perceived pain of adoption. On the other hand, Lisp has a high perceived pain of adoption and there's nothing specific that it solves for most users today, so there's little popularity. An unrelated thought experiment on the importance of languages vs libraries: for most programming problems, would you be better off with an old language and today's libraries (e.g. Fortran 77 somehow using the .NET or Python libraries), or a modern language without modern libraries? I argue that you could solve real-world problems fairly efficiently with the former, but would be pretty stuck with the latter. And an unrelated thought on languages and Turing completeness: has anyone considered "OS completeness" - how close you could come to writing an OS in the language? Obviously you need a bit of chip-specific assembly language, but C gets you very very close. Something like Java needs a larger assembly language layer [see jnode]. [1] http://www.righto.com/2008/07/why-your-favorite-language-is-unpopular.html http://www.righto.com/2008/07/why-your-favorite-language-is-...