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The World's Most Popular Programming Language Has Fashion and Luck to Thank
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05/15/2009, by Douglas Crockford
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A programming language cobbles a model of computation with some sort of expressive syntax. Most languages will have a set of useful values such as numbers and texts (which most languages, strangely, call strings), and operations that mutate and synthesize values and some form of variation or repetition, and some way of packaging operations into more convenient idioms. The variations that are possible are endless.
The art in language design is knowing what to leave out. The features of a good language work together harmoniously. A good language helps us to better understand a problem and to find the best expression of its solution.
A good language is composed of a limited set of features. But there is little agreement on which features are best. Programmers can argue endlessly about features and whether a set of features makes one language better than another. Features matter, but we just don't understand yet how they matter.
Language design has more to do with fashion than technology. It may seem strange that fashion is a major factor in the nerdliest of arts, but it is true. A language with radically different syntax, for example, has no hope of finding broad adoption, regardless of the brilliance of its design. This tends to constrain the rate at which languages evolve.
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