Social Influence on Language Adoption

[bearophile]

Andrei Alexandrescu:

> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/yon3i/social_influences_on_language_adoption_pdf/

Some people on Lambda the Ultimate have criticized the quality of 
the sources of the data, but despite those sources not looking 
the best, I think the data is acceptable:
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4593

One of the things said by the paper is:

>Result 8. Curriculum matters more than college major in 
>predicting which sorts of languages programmers know.
This result implies that adherents of a particular language 
family, such as functional or logic programming, should emphasize 
introducing developers to these concepts and languages while they 
are still in school. While developers may be willing to learn new 
languages throughout their career, they do not appear nearly so 
inclined to learn new paradigms.<

At the university closest to me I see many various CS teachers 
pushing hard for functional languages (but some courses require 
languages like C or even assembly). So maybe future students will 
be less willing to use imperative/OOP languages.

Bye,
bearophile