First off, do not think that it only programming languages which benefit and suffer from popularity. This is a broad sweeping issue which touches on most of technology (and many aspects of life).
That said: Why do modern systems crash so much, and fail in so many other ways? Why is low-latency access to i/o so obscure and complicated? In other words, it's not just popularity in the context of the language itself which can create problems - it also hits the underlying system and the surrounding environment. The "glut of popularity" tends to be a precursor of other failure modes. You get a lot of people jumping on the bandwagon, and a lot of hype about how great things are, and a lot of disappointment on the part of many of them when they find that the hype they were fed was mostly inaccurate. This buries the useful stuff in useless junk. The good stuff is still out there, but finding it becomes more and more difficult. Why do you think it's so hard to find COBOL programmers nowadays? Is it because it was never popular? Is it because there is no money to be made in banking? Is it because people are not motivated by profit? Or is it because of something to do with its past popularity and the resulting stinks that got raised? People copy other people and once popularity reaches a certain point you get a lot of people mostly copying other people's mistakes. And network and hierarchical structures - political, business, military, religious, etc. - all of them struggle with this aspect of how people deal with other people. So, to take the example of Java, just coding in it nowadays usually requires that you wade through a bunch of broken and useless "IDE features (wizards, preferences, etc. etc.)" and hook up with a bunch of barely adequate components that more often get in the way than get anything useful done... "It's all good." Here's some other questions to think about: (*) Why does malware even exist? (*) Why do we have to deal with it? (*) Why does it mostly hit the most popular platforms and environments? Maybe this is somehow a good thing - you learn things from learning to deal with the resulting problems. Probably mostly you learn to reboot the machine and/or to go try something else. But you do learn from this kind of thing. And, nowadays, a lot of programming time has to do with being forced to ignore almost everything that's out there because you simply don't have any better options. Just figuring out what to focus on, and identifying the relevance is something of an art. And if you pay attention, you'll see lots of contradictory advice on what you should be doing about this -- and lots of contradictory efforts. Anyways, you cannot ignore popularity. But it's not all good. -- Raul On Mon, Aug 1, 2016 at 1:02 PM, Thomas Costigliola <[email protected]> wrote: > I will not question the general premise; that in some situations popularity > can cause more problems than it can fix. But to make things more concrete > can you give an account of a programming language that suffered from a glut > popularity? > > On 08/01/2016 10:42 AM, Raul Miller wrote: >> >> On Mon, Aug 1, 2016 at 9:51 AM, Thomas Costigliola <[email protected]> >> wrote: >>> >>> I would not automatically discount popularity. Usually, the more viral a >>> language is, the more people there are working to improve it and the >>> faster >>> it matures. Also, there are more libraries and better interoperability >>> with >>> other languages and environments. All of which in turn increases >>> popularity. >>> The question is which must come first, the chicken or the egg? >> >> >> You can't ignore popularity. >> >> But it's a tool, and one that destroys approximately as much as it >> creates. >> >> So one of the tricks is: how do you keep things working while >> supporting all the people who are jumping on the popularity train? >> That is not always easy. >> >> Thanks, >> > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
