What Languages Fix

This list hints at something interesting: The intent behind the creation of a programming language does not always match up with the result, or the culture around it. For example, you might say; Lua: SOL (our data language) doesn't have enough programming constructs. which is historically accurate, but in a modern context you might also say: Lua: Game engines and other apps need a really easy to integrate, reusable embeddable scripting language library. which is a vastly different problem that…

For scientific computing: Matlab: it takes way too much Fortran code to solve Ax=b Octave: Matlab is closed-source (and expensive) Julia: Matlab was designed by people who knew a lot more about numerical analysis than programming language design Python + SciPy: you don't actually need a whole new language just to solve Ax=b TeX: it's taking too long for people to typeset my books

Here are some graphs I knocked up a while ago: http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/EveryLanguageFixesSomething.ht... There was some discussion a while ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2816526 Added in edit: That's a shame - someone has flagged this item so it's no longer on the front page. 8-(

Haskell: there are too many experimental pure lazy functional languages. Scala: why should you have to choose between functional and object-oriented programming? F#: OCaml has no libraries. Erlang: C doesn't scale.