Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

We are at a point in history where the electrical telegraph is well established.

But people don't want to press letters one by one on a switch. They want to talk!

The first phones appear to have used telegraph lines directly.

Also wired phones don't require modulation, which likely made their development much easier than wireless voice transmission. You just send the signal as a voltage differential directly obtained from the air pressure: how the telephone works.

A language that allows you to talk to and command a computer.

There is only space for two languages at most in the world: the compiled one, and the interpreted one.

For 2020 now, when you have a choice, you must go for:

Those two are languages not by any means perfect from a language design point of view, and there are likely already better alternatives, they are only chosen due to a pragmatic tradeoff between ecosystem and familiarity.

Ciro predicts that Python will become like Fortran in the future: a legacy hated by most who have moved to JavaScript long ago (which is slightly inferior, but too similar, and with too much web dominance to be replaced), but with too much dominance in certain applications like machine learning to be worth replacing, like Fortran dominates certain HPC applications. We'll see. Maybe non performance critical scripting languages are easier to replace.

C++ however is decent, and is evolving in very good directions in the 2010's, and will remain relevant in the foreseeable future.

Bash can also be used when you're lazy. But if the project goes on, you will sooner or later regret that choice.

The language syntax in itself does not matter. All that matters is how many useful libraries and tooling it has.

This is how other languages compare:

A computer model that is as powerful as the most powerful computer model we have: Turing machine!

The dominating meme database as of 2020.