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| Date: | -- (:) |
| From: | Robert Fischer <robert@f...> |
| Subject: | OT: Commercial Support and Programming Languages |
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Ruby's wide-scale adoption has been driven by Rails, which is backed
first by 37Signals, and now by any army of freelance converts from
PHP. And now JRuby is being backed by Sun, too.<br>
<br>
The announcement of Perl's death has been widely exaggerated: go ask
your local Unix admin if Perl is dead. Now, it's not generally
considered a language appropriate for application development anymore,
which is one of the great "No duh, Sherlock!" realizations that our
industry has gone through.<br>
<br>
Perl's popularity came because it was basically the first-of-breed. It
came out of Larry Wall's collection of shell scripts, converted a bunch
of sysadmins from straight shell scripting, and leveraged that toehold
to become a "real" language. For years, it dominated as a system
administration language that could be cranked out quickly, at least
partially because it had an expansive and easy-to-use library system
(CPAN). Even if you could come up with a better language for system
scripting, you would have to port large swaths of CPAN before you would
practically edge out Perl. So nothing really made it to the surface to
compete against Perl for a long time. And O'Reilly had a big hand in
evangelizing Perl, although it didn't offer "commercial support" in the
form of consulting.<br>
<br>
Python is the interesting case, because it came out after Perl, but
still managed to gain a fairly significant following. It's still not
terribly widely adopted and particularly not widely adopted in
industry, so it doesn't manage to be a counterpoint to the basic
argument.<br>
<br>
~~ Robert.<br>
<br>
skaller wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:1194233546.27580.4.camel@rosella.wigram"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">On Sun, 2007-11-04 at 22:39 +0100, Oliver Bandel wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Zitat von skaller <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:skaller@users.sourceforge.net"><skaller@users.sourceforge.net></a>:
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">I think so, but I'm only guessing. Ubuntu Linux has commercial
support by Canonical, Fedora by Red-Hat, I believe this has
some impact on their popularity. C# is supported by MS,
Java by Sun.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">[...]
What's with C, C++, Perl?
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
C++ was developed by AT&T. HP pushed it into ANSI Standardisation
so they could us it in certain contracts. It went up to a joint
ANSI/ISO process later. There are many many commercial supporters
of C and C++ software.
Perl is dead... maybe *because* it lacked commercial support
as a language.
There are certainly popular Open Source languages without
commercial support for the language development though:
Python and Ruby for example.
</pre>
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