On Saturday, 14 May 2016 at 09:59:47 UTC, Chris wrote:
So why then do we have Go, C# and Rust?
I believe we have Go because C++ was stagnant, but C++14 and beyond has become more favourable and Go is pushed into a speciality niche: light weight servers.
We have C# because Java was taking over large sections of the C++ domain and was a threat to VB?
I don't exactly know why we have Rust... Maybe because Mozilla likes to see themselves as Google's peer and want to have their own language as well? I somehow doubt that the costs of developing Rust will pay off for Mozilla.
That a service is run in a certain language is no proof. I've an old homepage that was written in PHP. It works, you can add to it. But is it easy to maintain? Sure Google have loads of coders who can maintain even the messiest code base. You could write a service in Perl.
Perl and Php were never intended for writing larger programs, so not sure how those can be used as an example.
The trend is that scripting is taking over UI programming. For many applications the UI is a big chunk of the codebase. Recompilation just to tweak the UI is annoying so I don't expect this trend to change. This is an old trend too, emacs being a prime example.
