[OT] compiler optimisations

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 24 April 2015 at 14:41:13 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> On Friday, 24 April 2015 at 07:04:10 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
> wrote:
>> the market for programming languages is a Winner Takes It All 
>> market.
>
> /*Scratching my head*/
>
> I don't see how anyone could possibly describe the current 
> landscape as "winner takes it all". Scala, Clojure, D, Go, 
> Haskell, C#, Objective C, Swift, Ceylon, Python, Ruby, PHP, 
> Julia...these are just a few of the languages that I've watched 
> develop in recent years.

General system level languages: C/C++, Ada. The rest are marginal.

On the JVM you get some "big" marginal languages in addition to 
Java because you have a stable VM, thus reducing risk/retain 
interoperability. But they are marginal compared to Java.

Objective-C/Swift would be dead without Cocoa. They are framework 
languages and marginal outside the framework.

C# would be dead without Windows. It is a framework language that 
is being pushed outside the framework, but would still die 
without it.

Web dev is a fashion industry, not an engineering discipline. The 
hot frameworks shift constantly: Perl is dying, Php is dying, 
Ruby may be next, Go is still marginal and could be a fad.

Haskell is a marginal language, even though it is big within the 
FP community as it is backed by programming language research 
(you can say the same about ML).

Adoption of programming languages are by nature tied to their eco 
system (libraries, frameworks, and eductional resources), so you 
have potential for exponential growth and lock in, hence the 
winner takes it all.

There are _lots_ of languages, most are close to dead, some are 
lingering, some are clinging to a niche... but only a few ones 
gain momentum.