Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

It is said, that once upon a time, programmers used CSV and collaborated on SourceForge, and that everyone was happy.

These days, are however, long gone in the mists of time as of 2020, and beyond Ciro Santilli's programming birth.

Except for hardware developers of course. The are still happily using Perforce and Tcl, and shall never lose their innocence. Blessed be their souls. Amen.

TODO why did Python kill it? They are very similar and existed at similar times, and possibly Perl was more popular early on.

Perl likely killed Tcl.

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: