Languages, Levels, Libraries, and Longevity

Abstract

In 50 years, we've already seen numerous programming systems come and (mostly) go, although some have remained a long time and will probably do so for: decades? centuries? millennia? The questions about language designs, levels of abstraction, libraries, and resulting longevity are numerous. Why do new languages arise? Why is it sometimes easier to write new software than to adapt old software that works? How many different levels of languages make sense? Why do some languages last in the face of "better" ones?We can gather insights from the last 50 years of programming systems to the current time. For the far future, Vernor Vinge's fine science-fiction novel, A Deepness in the Sky, rings all too true. The young protagonist, Pham, has joined a starship crew and is Languages, Programming Languages FOCUS Levels, Libraries, and Longevity Languages, Levels, Libraries, and Longevity Programming LanguagesFOCUS

Popularity, Interoperability, and Impact of Programming Languages in 100,000 Open Source Projects

“…Thus, for each programming language, we count Our findings are globally similar to the ranking provided by GitHub and used by Conway in his study. 8 JavaScript largely outranks other programming languages with 27,873 projects, which represents 27.87% of all projects in our dataset. The next ones in the ranking are also other scripting languages that are popularly used in 19.86% (Ruby), 15.22% (Python), and 14.44% (Shell) of the projects, respectively.…”

“…The top ranks are still held by scripting languages. However, when we compare the numbers of projects in Table IV with those in Table III, we can see that scripting languages are often used 8 http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2012/09/12/language-rankings-9-12/ as supporting languages. For example, although JavaScript appears in almost 28 thousands projects, it is the main language in only about 9 thousands (34.50% of all projects with some JavaScript code); The Shell scripting language appears in over 14 thousands projects, but it is the main language in only 3 thousands (22%) projects.…”

“…In his work on the longevity of languages, Mashey has suggested that early successes in programming languages such as C have built such an ecosystem that it may have become prohibitively costly to move to new, and possibly, better languages [8]. In earlier work, Wadler has discussed why no one uses functional languages [16].…”

Multi-language Synchronization

“…Prior work suggests that one of the principal reasons why programmers continue to use legacy languages is that they have built up such a strong ecosystem around them that the switching costs associated with moving to a new language are prohibitive [28,17]. In particular:…”

The long road to 64 bits

“…In 5,000 years, will some software maintainer still be muttering, "Why were they so dumb?" 4 We managed to survive the Y2K problem-with a lot of work. We're still working through 64/32.…”