Boxes and Glue: Politheistic Babel

Politheistic Babel
Tue 05 Feb 2008 at 18:06

A chart in a recent entry from Dalibor Topic gave me a chance to check for diversity in computer languages. I have seen reasoning about the importance of diversity in computer languages in several places, but I remember notably Ben Hyde’s. I think his post about small gods (June 2003) is a good description of the process:

A scripting layer creates a huge range of large range of affordances for the the users (or more likely their agents the developers) to leverage the underlying data-type.

The chart is in ohloh, about monthly commits by language. It shows C/C++ going slowly down from a plateau at about 80% of Open Source, to the current 40%, while all other languages (java is second at a plateau around 20% since 2002) eat slowly into C’s share. I think the data is suspect, though. When Emacs Lisp is charted, the first years in the chart seem to reflect mostly the process of maturity in Open Source: from 1995 to 2000 we see how emacs (C+emacs list) gets from being all of the open source pool to just a small drop of it, as we can see in this view of “all-but-the-first”. Still, even discounting the 1995-2000 period, we see C/C++ loosing relevance, java as a stable second, php standing around 10% while python is in a close sprint for this third position, and other languages (perl, C# and ruby) in a pack after it. It looks like the web is a driving force of this tendency. I see it as a synergy of:

information access, that enables faster propagation of languages
distributed development, which eases polycultures, integrating via data
free software (no license friction to have, say, ruby, perl, python, lua in the same box)

Another quote from Ben’s post, still relevant after five years:

People tend to get all fixated on the role of protocols (XML et. al.) as the tool for creating openness and interoperability across the Internet. That maybe a mistake. It maybe we should be a lot more conscience about the role of a diverse population of languages in this game. That a world of one language is, in time, a monotheistic world. That world, while possibly somewhat more efficient, encourages a monopoly.

Tue 05 Feb 2008

Very nicely written and interesting post

Posted by Nikos Kouremenos at 19:08

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Dead like me

Regularly, and almost predictably twice a year, the search for the next big thing to replace Java results in some other platform being hyped up as the Java killer. It used to be PHP, then C#, then Python, then C#, then Ruby, then C#, then Erlang,...

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