

The Rise and Fall of Languages in 2012 - wmat
http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-rise-and-fall-of-languages-in-2012/240145800

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chubot
Someone else posted this another thread and I agree: any methodology that
determines that JavaScript is "treading water" is suspect. Even if you ignore
JS on the server side, I would be very surprised if its importance and use was
not increasing pretty rapidly.

~~~
tom_m
I agree...I couldn't trust an article that thinks JS is "treading water' ...
It's so far from the truth it's not funny. Keep in mind things like MongoDB
use JavaScript with map/reduce and other commands. Then of course look no
farther than the mobile world. If anything I would expect JavaScript to become
one of the top most used and popular languages out there. Given that it can be
used for many, many, things including some decent graphics work. Desktop apps,
mobile, server, databases, and of course (and always since the 90's) blinky
text in HTML documents =)

~~~
chewxy
Or it could be you're in a bubble, and the greater world has not heard about
the great and wonderful javascript yet.

------
wmat
Does anyone else see a lucrative consulting opportunity in declining
languages? I know a LOT of people still writing COBOL for a very good living,
so who's to say in 10-15 years you won't be re-factoring enterprise Java in
the same way.

Of course, you might want to just kill yourself first.

~~~
azakai
There's nothing wrong with writing COBOL. It isn't new and shiny, but is that
all everyone looks for in a job?

~~~
lmm
I look for enjoyment, which involves a lot of things, but feeling that I'm
doing something constructive is a big part of that, and when I spend days
trying to write something that I could do in two minutes (or wouldn't be
necessary at all) in a better language it gets very demoralizing.

------
Kilimanjaro
"Out of the ~250 programs I wrote last year, 2-3 would have benefited from
being written in a functional style."

Donald Knuth

~~~
krichman
One of the things Knuth is famous for is writing a lengthy program for word
counts that was equivalent to no more than 6 lines of shell script.

I highly doubt that he's wrong regarding his own programs, but it's most
certainly wrong for the majority of programmers.

PS if we're going to appeal to authority, Church and Lambda Calculus were
there first.

~~~
d0mine
Discussion of the word count problem Knuth vs. McIlroy
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4304696>

------
wmat
And for context:

2011:

[http://www.drdobbs.com/mobile/the-rise-and-fall-of-
programmi...](http://www.drdobbs.com/mobile/the-rise-and-fall-of-programming-
languag/232400093)

2010:

[http://www.drdobbs.com/tools/the-rise-and-fall-of-
languages-...](http://www.drdobbs.com/tools/the-rise-and-fall-of-languages-
in-2010/229100358?actionType=twdl)

------
andrewflnr
It seems a shame about TCL. It has some cool ideas, including at least some
degree of homoiconicity. I don't suppose a new replacement with the design
warts removed would get much traction, either.

~~~
Toenex
Yes, Tcl has it's problems but it seems a shame to see it appear to approach
end-of-life,especially with the recent 8.6 release - although it is only in
8.6 that an 'official' object system has been added so maybe that says
something.

Obviously Tcl has Tk which I think was for a long time a significant
attraction - certainly was for me in the 1990's. The ability to script, cross
platform GUI applications that glued bits of existing c code was exciting at
the time. I had a significant amount of image processing stuff working this
way with some very workable Tcl/Tk interfaces using OpenGL. That was fun too.

However, I've been using Lua for some of the same reasons that I used to use
Tcl. In particular I like the simple nature of the language especially
allowing a multi-paradigm approach to development. Although I have heard some
argue it just supports many paradigms equally badly on single person projects,
it's expressive enough. It's code base is small and neat - Tcl was always kept
in good shape - and it is obviously designed for extendibility but with just
enough of a core language to be of value on the vast number of platforms on
which it runs. There are a reasonable number of addons and libraries available
but the small core is a primary characteristic of Lua. Thus to get greater
functionality you need to 'craft' your own setup which allows you to deploy
just what you need for the task - the language is uber dynamic in that
respect. LuaJIT is a nice bonus and the performance figures certainly suggest
some stunning improvements are possible - not used it myself. Whilst
understandable, it is a shame that LuaJIT isn't totally compatible with 5.2.
Lua even has a pretty close approximation to Tk in IUP
[<http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup/>].

------
curiousdannii
Anyone else thought this would be a report on the number of moribund human
languages in 2012?

