Re: What design is: 911 vs. Fleetwood

[Paul Prescod <address@hidden>]

Paul Graham wrote:
> 
> I think the smartest programmers have a lot more power in
> dictating language popularity than most people realize.
> Remember Ada and C?  As I heard it, the DoD required all
> their software to be written in Ada, and you had to get
> an exemption to use anything else.  But the best hackers
> insisted on using C, and the DoD had to grant so many
> exemptions that Ada soon became a dead letter.

According to your theory of language popularity, Ada was doomed from the
beginning because it didn't have a platform or killer app in the sense 
that C and Perl have Unix, Java has the browser-embedded JVM and 
EJB, PHP has Apache and so forth.

If popularity is a goal, then perhaps you should polish up
your resume and get a job at an operating system company. ;)
The app seems so much more important than the language's quality that
spending effort on the language design is just a distraction from
finding the app that will drive the language's popularity. Of course you
might have other reasons for caring about the language's quality!

 Paul Prescod