Re: OT: Why is C so popular?
On Wed, 2003-08-27 at 18:46, Gregory Seidman wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 27, 2003 at 10:02:44PM +0200, Thomas Krennwallner wrote:
[...]
> }
> } And that all doesn't matter if you're a free software developer...
> } You use the tools YOU like, the language YOU think is the right one for
> } your project and don't have to give a damn about other opinions why this
> } or that language has to be better than the other.
>
> ...unless you are trying to build up a community of contributors around
> your project, in which case you had better use a language that people who
> are likely to want to contribute are likely to know. In that case, whatever
> has taken the world by storm is probably a good choice, assuming it is even
> a reasonable fit to the task.
Good point. Sawfish was essentially maintainerless for quite some time
due in large part to a lack of developers familiar with lisp, or maybe
it was the particular dialect of lisp (scheme?, rep?). I would imagine
that projects written in fortran/tcl/ruby would also have fewer people
in the community with the experience to contribute than comparable
programs written in C/Perl/Python.
Not that it detracts from the value of the languages themselves, just
that, for community-driven projects, finding a large(ish) potential
community is probably a good idea.
At the risk of branching off in a bad direction, I sometimes wonder
whether multi-language environments like .net and (someday) parrot will
alleviate or aggravate this sort of problem. I can just imagine horrible
programming monstrosities written partly in perl, partly in tcl, python,
C, and java.
Boy, that was a ramble, need more sudafed :-)
-Mark
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