donn@hp-dcd.UUCP (11/27/83)
#R:fortune:-182500:hp-dcd:24200002:000:497 hp-dcd!donn Nov 25 10:24:00 1983 Re: There are more programs written in Fortran... There are more lines of code written in COBOL... (Given the nature of the two languages, both could be true...) (Quite) a few years ago I heard a statement like that only it went: There are more programs in RPG than any other language[sic]. ([sic] on the word "language" because its not clear that RPG is a language, its just used line one (sort of)). I sincerely hope its no longer true, if it ever was. Donn Terry ...hplabs!hp-dcd!donn
whm@arizona.UUCP (Bill Mitchell) (12/13/83)
From: andree@uokvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: RE: Re: great quote about the 'C' la - (nf)
Date: Sat, 10-Dec-83 20:50:38 MST
...
Final note: Horrowitz (sp?) gave three rules for having a succesfull
(i.e., popular) language:
1) Write a good, clear book describing the language. The
emphasis is on writing code, not exact definitions.
2) Write a compiler for it that at least generates code.
3) Sell the compiler incredibly cheaply. Better yet, give it
away.
It seems that Horowitz has missed the most important point: there must
be some need for the language. There are certainly hundreds of "major"
languages that meet points 2 and 3, and many of those have adequate
documentation available. However, if a language is going to be successful,
it must fill a need that isn't met by available languages. If a language
very similar to C, but with some of the blemishes removed, was introduced
today, would it be very popular? I doubt it.
Programmers need to be motivated to move from one language to another.
Personally, I find many of the new languages to be interesting, but before
I'm going to switch from one language to another, I'm going to need a good
reason. It appears that many of the popular languages today gained
acceptance because they could do things significantly better than other
languages available at the time of their introduction. Consider this:
of the languages that are in widespread use today, how many of them were
drastically different from other languages available at the time of their
appearance? Think about FORTRAN, Lisp, COBOL, APL, C; they were all
departures from what was generally available. Note also that in many ways,
the new aspects of the languages arose from needs that weren't being met.
So, I propose a new rule:
The language must fill a niche in the environment it is designed
for, and it must be able to displace competitors for that niche.
Bill Mitchell
whm.arizona@rand-relay
{kpno,mcnc,utah-cs}!arizona!whmandyb@dartvax.UUCP (Andy Behrens) (12/17/83)
> However, if a language is going to be successful, > it must fill a need that isn't met by available languages.... > > Of the languages that are in widespread use today, how many of them were > drastically different from other languages available at the time of their > appearance? Think about FORTRAN, Lisp, COBOL, APL, C; ... Then think about Basic and Pascal, both popular languages, and more widely used than Lisp or APL. For a long time after its introduction, Basic had poor text-string handling and clumsy subroutines. Some early implementations allowed strings, but only allowed them to be used as indivisible pieces; there was no way to concatenate them or pull out substrings. Other implementations allowed substrings, but used array notation for them, so that there was no way to have an array of strings. Even Dartmouth's Basic (as late as 1968) allowed access to individual characters of a string only through a rather contrived "change" command, which converted strings to numeric arrays. And yet by 1968, Basic was already in widespread use. What did Basic have that its cousin Fortran didn't? I/O was simpler, since format statements weren't needed. Any arithmetic expression at all could be used as a subscript. And it was interactive. (But IBM offered Quiktran, an interactive implementation of Fortran, and that certainly never caught on). Similarly, ask yourself what Pascal had that Algol-W didn't. A few more data types, better declarations.... If you want your language to succeed, let it be innovative. But don't forget the importance of compiler that is cheap enough OR small enough to run on many machines. -- Andy Behrens decvax!dartvax!andyb
preece@uicsl.UUCP (01/05/84)
#R:arizona:-678500:uicsl:6200004:000:625 uicsl!preece Jan 4 14:28:00 1984 The 'change' command in Dartmouth Basic was really a very useful tool (as I'm sure Andy remembers). It allowed the programmer to specify a byte size in making the change, so that a variable number of sub-components could be packed into a 36-bit word. It would have been nice to have had more powerful string functions, though. Basic also avoided the silly card format problems of FORTRAN, but I think the principal reason it caught on was that it was very easy to implement, allowing the early micro implementors to produce a useful language that would run in a small, slow machine. scott preece ihnp4!uiucdcs!uicsl!preece