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Your comment about the lack of 'awareness on usages of different languages' rings so true. Especially for the cases where the research goes into making new 'ube

Your comment about the lack of 'awareness on usages of different languages' rings so true. Especially for the cases where the research goes into making new 'uber' languages (which was my understanding of most of the research area until reading this article and then investigating more). I recently watched this talk at UW (http://www.cs.washington.edu/events/colloquia/search/details?id=2594 http://www.cs.washington.edu/events/colloquia/search/details...) and was frustrated by that exact problem. It is interesting to use data from engineers to determine the usefulness of a language, but you'll still never drive adoption everywhere. There are plenty of other aspects of programming languages which deserve to be applied to other fields of CS and more coverage on the research coming out of those areas.

jules 11y ago
Currently it is the case that certain languages are better for specific problem domains, but that's mainly a library issue or a platform constraint (e.g. web app -> js). I don't see any reason why we need so many general purpose languages. Domain specific languages, sure. Why do we need so many general purpose languages? What exactly are the design constraints that are fundamentally incompatible between those languages? Case in point: the comment above you cites TCL, Javascript, MATLAB, R as examples of why we need many languages, when all of them are terrible language design. TCL has good built-in gui facilities, Javascript is built into browsers, MATLAB has many scientific libraries, R has many stats libraries. That's why they are used, not because the languages are any good.