Most popular programming languages 1965-2019 (visualised)

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Friday, 11 October 2019 at 11:08:55 UTC, Chris wrote:
> Care to write a book? I think you, Paulo Pinto and Walter and 
> others here could write a good book about it.

I am sure somebody has done so? There is at least a scientific 
journal about the history of computing where articles describe 
old systems in detail in order to record the history for future 
generations. (I did write an article about the first user-built 
graphical MUD on the Internet, though. I have to put it on the 
web some day.)

Actually, that would be a good theme for a youtube channel.

> I find it fascinating how companies like SUN etc. defeated 
> themselves.

Yeah, SUN and SGI had some great tech ideas and I assume they 
also had great engineers and it still didn't work out. I wonder 
what they could have come up with if they had addressed the 
personal computing space.

They didn't survive networked clusters of Linux commodity-PCs and 
fast cheap ethernet interconnects...

> Things have developed incredibly fast, but not as fast as they 
> could. What are the factors? Marketing strategies, 
> narrow-mindedness etc.

Right, and there are some recurring themes.

Like the introduction of the iPad was kinda like the 80s all 
over. People got iPads, was fascinated by the hardware and was 
looking high and low to find applications to run on it, which in 
the early days were not polished. It was not obvious what they 
could use it for so people created many kinds of apps, and users 
were looking for the next great thing to try out.

That's pretty much what the early personal computing era was like 
too. People had very little preconception of what was possible 
with their hardware and would look for new and interesting 
software to run on it.

Today there seems to be stagnation and lots of copying. The most 
profitable and marketable ideas are rehashed in 100s, if not 
1000s of variations and new and unique ideas kind of drown in the 
noise. So, now you have not only to create an interesting 
polished app, you also need to understand marketing really well 
(and have money to do it).

Seems that the early days of new tech are the most interesting 
times, then we hit a low creativity equilibrium. Kinda sad... so 
much potential that is probably overlooked.

There might be a similar dynamics in relation to programming 
languages.
Gonna think about that some.