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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!dartvax!andyb
From: andyb@dartvax.UUCP (Andy Behrens)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: Language popularity
Message-ID: <521@dartvax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 16-Dec-83 21:24:03 EST
Article-I.D.: dartvax.521
Posted: Fri Dec 16 21:24:03 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 17-Dec-83 08:33:44 EST
References: <6785@arizona.UUCP>
Organization: Dartmouth College
Lines: 35

>   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