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.