Truth in dating (was: HELP! Must choose language!)

[Cameron Laird]

In article <mailman.1041399123.31276.python-list at python.org>,
Terry Hancock  <hancock at anansispaceworks.com> wrote:
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>Actually I'm sure all those languages will still be used by somebody, but 
>relative popularity is fickle.  Just compare the current marketplace with 
>where it was ten years ago (1993). Remember, that's the year HTTP was first 
>deployed.  Linux was a fledgling and hardly anyone had heard of Python (I 
>don't actually know when Python was invented). Java was hardly known either. 
>Perl was around, but not that widely used (because it was the web that made 
>it insanely popular).  I don't think CGI had been invented, and C/C++ 
>dominated the commercial programming marketplace.  People who wanted to sound 
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I'll leave aside questions about the acceptance of
C++ in commercial programming at the beginning of 
'93, and whether Perl was "widely used".

I'm not sure what you mean by "deployed".  <URL:
http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/Link.html >
has been in *use* since late 1990.  In January 1993,
there were over four dozen public HTTP server known.
RFC 1945 specified HTTP 1.0 in 1996 (!), but it 
states, "HTTP has been in use ... since 1990."

Guido invented Python in '90--he'd been designing
it over the winter '89 holidays.  First public re-
least was in 1991.  c.l.p was created in 1994.

Sun formally announced Java at SunWorld '95 (May 
23).  Usable forms of the language were in the
lab around a year earlier (*not* in 1991, though
you'll sometimes see that), but it was only early
in 1995 that the name "Java" was adopted, or that
outsiders had a chance to use it.
-- 

Cameron Laird <Cameron at Lairds.com>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://phaseit.net/claird/home.html