D beyond the specs

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Friday, 16 March 2018 at 14:50:26 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> Well, Algol, Pascal, Oberon, Component Pascal, VHDL, Ada are 
> all examples of programming languages successfully used in 
> Europe, while having adoption issues on US.

There are some historical roots, I believe. In the 60s and 70s 
computing was so expensive that government funding was a driving 
force. Since each nation then also wanted to have their own 
computing industry they favour national companies (and thus 
employment), so each nation had their own CPU/hardware 
architecture and eco system. And Europe has many many nations... 
So quite a heterogenous computing environment... :-P

The US has a much bigger internal market and some key big players 
early on ("nobody has been fired for picking IBM"). They also 
have many large corporation that could sustain the cost of 
establishing a commercial computing sector.

Not sure how that works out today, though, as there is no longer 
a strong focus on national computing industries (unless you count 
Apple and Microsoft as such). Asia has run away with the hardware 
and development software has become less and less 
proprietary/national each decade.

My perception is that there is a difference between academic 
research oriented institutions and more rural engineering 
institutions. The former would focus more on language qualities 
(surprisingly University of Oslo is now switching from Java to 
Python, probably because it used a lot in data analysis), while 
the latter would focus more on business marketable languages 
(C++).

Anyway, cultural change is slow. Even though the 70s is far away, 
it still probably has an effect on culture and attitudes in 
universities and the tech sector.

Also, since most applications are no longer CPU bound there 
should be much more opportunity for trying new options today than 
10-20 years ago.