Re: The Promise of Forth

On Apr 2, 12:44 pm, John Doty <j...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Are network economies responsible for the distribution?

It doesn't matter. Each language has a specific history and set of
characteristics. The existence of a distribution does not imply
randomness.

The existence of the network economies strong enough to create a power
law distribution implies that if there are a large number of computer
programming languages that feasibly could be dominant programming
languages, only a limited number of them will be.

That then implies that while the observation that a computer
programming language *is not* a dominant language is not on its own an
implication that it does not have the characteristics to permit it to
be.

Just as a firm's share of a market depends not just on the
characteristics of the products it places on the market, and the
desires and budgets of consumers buying in the market, but also on
whether the market conditions leads to a natural monopoly, natural
oligopoly, or monopolistically competitive industry.

If the market is a natural oligopoly with a competitive fringe, then
there are only going to be a few producers in dominant market
positions, and the competitive fringe may well include firms that may
have been one of the oligopolists if key strategic transactions had
turned out better ... and, yes, sometimes including pure luck, good or
bad.
.

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