Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cwjcc!hal!nic.MR.NET!shamash!raspail!bga
From: bga@raspail.UUCP (Bruce Albrecht)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: What makes a language successful? (Was: Algol-68 down for the count)
Message-ID: <1075@raspail.UUCP>
Date: 5 Dec 88 03:54:13 GMT
References: <388@ubbpc.UUCP> <16187@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <599@quintus.UUCP> <413@ubbpc.UUCP>
Organization: Control Data Corporation, Arden Hills, MN
Lines: 21

I'm sure there are a lot of compiler writers that would love to know what makes
a language a success, too.  My guess is that there are going to be several
different styles of languages that are successful.  I think that there's always
going to be some call for a business oriented language, an block structured
algorithmic language, object oriented, and a few other classes that may not
yet fit our problem-solving paradigms.  As to which languages, I think it may
depend on which languages have cheap efficient compilers on a large number
of dissimiliar computing environments.

Although I agree with Mr. Hutchinson that using uncommon languages causes
portability and maintainability problems, this is the only way that an
uncommon language becomes common.  If people only stick with C, Fortran or
COBOL, how will we get the next languages that we use to solve the new
type of problems we will have to be solving the the next decade or two.  I
think we are going to be using languages that make it easy to manipulate
relational databases, windows, and parallel processes (not necessarily all
by the same language).  It will be hard to convince people to go to the
new languages that make these sorts of problems trivial, just as it is
hard to get users of obsolete languages to switch to the current ones (just
how many Fortran-66 users are there these days).
the way we program.