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: Algol-68 down for the count (was: Why have FORTRAN 8x at all?) Summary: Too small a sample Message-ID: <1064@raspail.UUCP> Date: 29 Nov 88 15:03:39 GMT References: <388@ubbpc.UUCP> <16187@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <599@quintus.UUCP> <406@ubbpc.UUCP> Organization: Control Data Corporation, Arden Hills, MN Lines: 23 In article <406@ubbpc.UUCP>, wgh@ubbpc.UUCP (William G. Hutchison) writes: > [list showing that many "successful" languages are "better" if developed > by a small group ] > > I still maintain that this supports my earlier thesis: that committee- > designed languages fail and individually-designed languages succeed. Now that > I have defined success and failure more clearly, more people might agree. I have sometimes agreed with this thesis, but I really wonder if it's just another truism. There are a lot of languages out there that were developed by individuals (Snobol, Icon, Euclid, Trac, FP, etc.) that probably would be considered successes under your first criterion, but never achieved wide-scale popularity, for numerous reasons, including lack of publicity or machine implementations, or similarity to other languages. Sure, some of the individually designed languages are popular, and are "well-designed", but I don't buy that it is because of how many people designed it. I wonder if C would be popular today, if there hadn't been a university computing revolution around Unix, and I'm not convinced that Modula 2 would be any more successful than any other Pascal successor, if it had been designed by anybody other than Wirth. Did IBM become the number one computer company in the world because it built better machines and better software? I don't think so. The right kind of salesmanship did it, and I think that this is true of programming languages as well.