evaluation question
rbowman
bowman at montana.com
Wed Feb 1 22:33:24 EST 2023
On 1 Feb 2023 17:31:02 GMT, Stefan Ram wrote:
> rbowman <bowman at montana.com> writes:
>><Venting> Why does every language have to invent their own function to
>>print to the console that is very similar but not the same as the rest
>>of the herd?</Venting>
>
> Why do there have to be different languages at all?
https://homepages.cwi.nl/~steven/abc/programmers/introduction.html
"Why ABC?
The answer to the question 'Why a new language?' is the same as the answer
to the question 'Why new computers?': because they can help you do the job
better. With the choice between a language where it will take a week to
write a program, and a language where it will take an afternoon, most
people will choose the latter."
That leads to the question of when Van Rossum was looking for a hobby
project, why not extend ABC? Or Pike?
https://pike.lysator.liu.se/about/history/
Then there is the question of how a new language becomes popular. When
Matsumoto developed Ruby it was almost 4 years before there was any
coherent English documentation. How did it get traction?
How about Go? Thompson and Pike hate C++ (with cause) so they went back to
C and reworked it. Then there is C++ itself, which was released before its
time.
There are many more obscure languages when someone saw a need. Then there
are features the propagate like lambdas. Everyone came down with lambda
envy and shoehorned them into the language one way or the other.
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