I have a somewhat different take on this. These days I think that some languages get picked up for other reasons:
a) Relative Obscurity. This has a certain appeal to the `hipster` crowd. From my perspective many people around the London tech comunity have embraced Haskell and previously before that Clojure, for the sole reason that it was powerful but also importantly for them, not widely known or used. Their are certainly many start-up around London now using a wide proliferation of (older programming languages) that you wouldn't have seen advertised for start-up jobs a few years ago. For example, I guess not many people have heard of Frege, but I started looking at it because I wanted a Haskell that could integrate with existing JVM code. b) Marketing/Packaging/App. Actually I think Marketing has a huge influence on take-up. Perhaps we are talking a different kind of marketing though. I mean marketing directly to the developer mindset rather than to an organization or middle-management. This is where there is a very pretty looking website, which actually has relatively basic documentation and tutorials but the packaging of the entire experience is such that you want it to be as simple/fun as they claim. Interestingly 2 of the 3 Scala books that I have (and maybe also the 3rd but I haven't had a chance to read that yet), have a section of how to get Scala adopted in your work place, i.e. how to sell it to your manager; So in that manner you have developers acting as the marketeers of the programming language to the organisation. c) Jumping on the wagon. You go to a conference of a few meetups and here some talks about how Y achieved X in 1 week by using programming language Z. You have to do A, and you don't know Z, but suddenly it looks like an option, because you only have 2 weeks to do this in, and well they did that in 1 week. I guess in many ways this is just good marketing of Z, but I think there perhaps there could be a certain herd mentality as well. On 4 August 2015 at 09:44, Michael Kay <[email protected]> wrote: > Various programming >> languages had an amateurish start (this surely did not apply to >> JSONiq), but still have become huge without anyone advertising them. >> > > There are four preconditions to make a technology successful > > (a) it must meet a need > > (b) it must be understandable > > (c) it must be affordable > > (d) luck > > Elegance of design, in my experience, has very little to do with it; > marketing has even less. > > Michael Kay > Saxonica > > > > > _______________________________________________ > [email protected] > http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk -- Adam Retter skype: adam.retter tweet: adamretter http://www.adamretter.org.uk _______________________________________________ [email protected] http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk
