Communications of the ACM
Why Do Some Programming Languages Live and Others Die?
Leo Meyerovich
Credit: Leo Meyerovich / UC-Berkeley
Researchers at Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley are trying to determine why some programming languages become popular while others do not.
The researchers, led by Leo Meyerovich and Ari Rabkin, polled tens of thousands of programmers and analyzed 300,000 computing projects from SourceForge in an effort to determine why older languages, such as C, remain so popular. Part of the problem is that language designers do not always have practical objectives, according to the researchers.
"There’s a tendency in academics of trying to solve a problem when no one actually ever had that problem," Rabkin says.
He notes another problem is that designers overload new languages with extra features, which can overwhelm programmers. Meyerovich says the data also indicates that programmers are not always taking the time to really learn a new language when they start using it, which can lead to problems in the future. “Maybe the solution isn’t entirely technical,” he says. “We need to start building more ‘socially aware’ languages.”
The researchers also say another issue is complacency, as most programmers learn three or four languages but then stop learning new ones.
From Wired News
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