elevel’s
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(group member since May 31, 2010)
I agree. Poor topic cohesion in this chapter.Plenty to cover involving just regular expressions alone - perhaps across multiple languages.
Brad wrote: "This site tracks language usage and trends, based on mentions on the web. Objective-C broke into the top 10, with a huge growth rate. C moved over Java to the number 1 spot several months ago.h..."
Great site. Some observations and questions:
** In the top ten language rankings, I wondered if Zipf's Law might apply. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s...). Based on some preliminary calculations using Excel - it seems that it does... except for Java. Java's % is about half of what Zipf would predict. Curious...
** The TIOBE Programming Community Index shows some turbulence around March, 2004. The FAQ's indicate this was due to Google changing their methodology - with a resultant decline in Java and C++. That is, these were overrepresented in TIOBE's rankings, vs. those of (apparently) dynamic languages. It would be interesting to follow this further: it's hard to believe that Sun/ATT were "salting" the search results, somehow.
** Could Apple's recent hostility to non-Apple API's in iPhone/iPad development somehow be responsible for Objective-C's jump in popularity?
Bjarne's interview covers a *lot* of ground. Especially interesting to me is his take on Java vs C++. I never considered that Java's success was due to Sun's promotion of the language, but that makes sense in hindsight.
It is interesting that in the three "successful corporate" languages he references - Ada, C++, and Java - two of the three originating authorities essentially went bankrupt (Bell Labs, Sun) and the third (DOD) is running a big deficit.
Perhaps creating a "successful" widespread programming language lacks any real economic value in the marketplace for the company that creates it? If you try to sell your language, then programmers will turn away in favor of another more open language. But if you "give away" your language, you might not make enough $ to survive.
Apple's strategy re Objective-C seems to be avoiding this. Their recent restrictions on developers using other languages and APIs for Apple widget apps may seem to be driving developers away from Objective-C - but since Apple makes its $ off the hardware, this may not matter.
It's been more than a decade since I wrote any substantial C++, and I know that the language and libraries have changed - but I was always amazed at the complexity of the language. Bjarne puts down Java for its inefficiency, yet maybe its greater simplicity is worth it vis a vis C++, especially for teaching programming.
Related is this quote of Bjarne's - when he's asked whether it's worth it to design a new language:
That doesn't mean that I think that C++ is the perfect language of its kind. It is not; I'm convinced that you could design a language about a tenth of the size of C++ (whichever way you measure size) providing roughly what C++ does. However, there has to be more to a new language that just doing what an existing language can, but slightly better and slightly more elegantly.
Is "one-tenth" just slightly better? Seems it would be a "whole lot" better, especially for making it widely-used.
I'd like to second "Mythical Man-Month" as our next selection.Brooks just released his "follow-up" several months ago: "The Design of Design." It looks like a complementary read - though more complex than his first.
Covers both theory and practice of design in great detail - beyond any other treatment I've seen so far.
Maybe we could approach Brook's latest after digesting his first.
