Survival of the fittest

[Ben Finney]

baalbek <rcs at bgoark.no> writes:

> This unassuming scripting language has beaten heavy-weights like
> Java, C++, etc, and this without any serious marketing machine
> behind it.
>
> Why? The language is just so well designed (I miss some of Ruby's
> features, but then, nothing is perfect), robust, stable, and with a
> humongous amount of libraries, and runs without any modification on
> all OS platforms I use.

I attribute much of it to the fact that it's free software -- i.e. its
main implementations have, for its entire life, been freely modifiable
and redistributable by anyone. This gives it a qualitative edge in
adoption over Delphi and Java, at least; and is the primary reason for
"runs on all major platforms".

These days, I never want to invest in an OS or language, or pretty
much any infrastructural computing technology, unless it's free from
vendor lock-in. It's just too damned risky to rely on something that
isn't guaranteed to be supportible beyond a single vendor's whim.

That's "survival of the fittest" in computing technology as I see it
:-)

-- 
 \       "It is forbidden to steal hotel towels. Please if you are not |
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Ben Finney