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RE: Icon

Tim Hickey wrote:
> Another important thread in this How-will-Lisp-take-over-the-world  :)  is
>
>   Why do *real* programmers
>     (as opposed to Real Programers)
>   use Perl,Java,C,C++,PHP,Python,...
>     (and not Scheme, Dylan, Lisp, ML, Haskell, Self, Smalltalk, Icon,
>      Prolog, Ruby, APL, J, BRL, my-favorite-language ...)?
>
> Some of the reasons disucssed on this list are technical,
> some are psychological (cognitive complexity of nesting, language
> weight...)
> some are social (network effect, killerapp phenomenon)
> some are educational (structure of Computer Science curricula, existence
>                       of texts and tutorials).

Add historical reasons, and economic reasons, to that list.  Related to both
of these, is legacy code.

Programming languages became established and entered into use some time
before there were any useful formalisms for reasoning about them.  Partly as
a result, we're still dealing with languages which exhibit flaws for which
fixes are well known.  But the factors you've listed make changing a very
slow, difficult, and mostly evolutionary process.  Hopefully LLn and this
mailing list can give evolution a bit of a boost...

Anton