Most popular programming languages 1965-2019 (visualised)

[Chris]

On Friday, 11 October 2019 at 17:05:47 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:

>
> Right, but there is also a social factor. Many had fond 
> memories of their first mac, their first computer. Although the 
> machine itself was crazy expensive, Apple provided "cheap" 
> laser printers by driving it from the computer rather than 
> building the rendering engine into the printer. So mac+printer 
> was not unreasonable for office use with high quality printing. 
> So, in this period of Microsoft being too dominating, there 
> were plenty of buyers that wanted Mac to be great again.

Social factors, yes, a lot of Mac users worked in the "cool" 
sectors (layout, magazines, media in general). Apple had also 
struck a chord with their shiny animated icons and a computer 
that just worked when you bought it. With Windows there were 
still numerous issues. Windows had a "nerdy" GUI, MS wanted to 
lock users in, e.g. there were always issues with Java, whereas 
Apple shipped their Macs with Java - and Xcode. So Apple was also 
becoming a sound platform for software development. Ironically, 
all that changed after the advent of the iPhone and Apple began 
to lock users in and others out (just like MS had done before). I 
switched to Linux as I had promised I would, if they started to 
lock users and devs in - or out.

>
> Javascript clearly had an impact, but it might have happened 
> with another language too. As a consequence it is very 
> difficult to say what would have happened.

JS was at the right place at the right time, it was clever 
marketing, because the WWW would become huge anyway.

> Would Go and Swift have the same feature set if D had not 
> existed? Difficult to say. Have authors of other languages read 
> the D forums and gotten inspiration from what they have read? 
> Maybe, I don't know. Swift have at least picked up lambdas like 
> this "{$0 < $1}", maybe all on their own, maybe they were 
> inspired from /bin/sh, but I remember arguing for it in the 
> forums. We'll never know how languages actually evolve... 
> social dynamics are kind of messy.

I don't know. D's problem is that D devs don't know what they 
want, what D is supposed to achieve, so they have a new pet 
project every few months / years. Others just watch and pick and 
choose? But I don't know what impact D really has.

>
> Yeah, but is a bit scary that anything that is presented 
> visually in a crisp and clean manner based on "reputable 
> datasets" are intuitively taken as true. Human beings have very 
> little resistance to certain rhetorics. For this topic it was 
> not a big deal, but for other topics the political connotations 
> are not so great. Especially in this day and age of AI 
> recommender systems ("Did you like this biased presentation? 
> Then you probably also will like this biased presentation!" ;-)

We all knew that anyway, that and why C, JS and Objective-C got 
bigger. So I think we're safe here.