Re: Languages which turned corners

Anton Ertl wrote:
|I don't know what the programming language of the year 2000 will look
|like, but I know it will be called FORTRAN.

The impressions I have had in the last few years is that Fortran is on
its way to the display niche, too (OTOH, in my Usenet statistics
<http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/comp.lang-statistics/> it's
holding steady at a slightly higher popularity level than Forth).

Seems to be the case. Fortran for sure is useful in its niche, and it must
have been there for quite some time. In this ranking, niche languages are
languages with lower popularity, and not much ups and downs. Some niche
languages are not part of Anton's comparison, probably, because they are
tightly linked to a particular application and don't have a comp.lang group
(such as TeX or Matlab). It probably would shuffle this list considerably,
since these particular applications have some quite active usenet
groups ;-). Given that JavaScript is somewhat similar (mostly used inside a
web browser), it's definitely a sign that a sufficiently popular niche can
make a language quite popular, even when it's syntax is quite different
from C.

A good expample of how popular languages can demise is the fate of BASIC and
Pascal in this statistics: Both are now below Forth, while they topped C
and C++ 10 years ago. On the other hand, being old is no guarantee to
vanish: 10 years ago, Lisp was a similar "fringe language" as Forth (both
bottom end of the top 20), now it's in the top ten, and by this measure,
about twice as popular as Forth.

--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/
.

Relevant Pages

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  • Re: Fortran now in the Great Language Shootout
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  • Re: Fortran bashing in the MATLAB newsgroup
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