On: Why Lisp is a Big Hack and Haskell is Doomed to Succeed (2011)

[ksikka]

Your logic and reasoning seems to be all correct except for one thing... "Better languages" don't necessary succeed. I mean, just look at PHP and Javascript... Would you say that they were doomed to succeed because of their language features? There's more to "language success" than the technical characteristics of the language.

[skybrian → ksikka]

Yes, PHP and JavaScript show that deployment is everything. A language that works well with your target platform is better than one that doesn't.

(With PHP, it was apparently a bit subtle; ISP's can host it easily and it works well with live updates via ftp, and that beat out language features.)

Objective C is a third example: It's popular because iPhone.