Because It's Not Fun Enough | bytecode.news
Andrew Oram asked why programming languages rise and fall, and quoted the answer without noticing. Programming is a vocation, an art, and a job. Make any of those harder than they need to be, and your language survives exactly as long as it can't be replaced.
Andrew Oram wrote a two-part series for the Linux Professional Institute asking why programming languages rise and fall (parts one and two.) It says, roughly, that C, C++, and JavaScript are immortal (for now!), with Java a maybe; COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC, and Perl lived respectable lives and got sent upstate to retire on a farm; Pascal, Objective-C, PL/I, Ada, and Tcl were false starts, with Ruby somewhere on the bubble. It's a good tour from a man who has been editing this industry's books forever, and near the end of it, Oram quotes Simon Peyton Jones, who observes that a language's adoption…
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