this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
175 points (94.0% liked)

Programming

17524 readers
348 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev



founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Why are there so many programming languages? And why are there still being so many made? I would think you would try to perfect what you have instead of making new ones all the time. I understand you need new languages sometimes like quantumcomputing or some newer tech like that. But for pc you would think there would be some kind of universal language. I'm learning java btw. I like programming languages. But was just wondering.

(page 3) 29 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] snownyte@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Especially if one of them is based off the other.

Rust is based off of C/C++
Ruby is based off of Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, BASIC, Java, and Lisp

Just a couple of examples. Quite frankly, it's dependent on what system, what infrastructure .etc that'll be the call for a specific programming language. Nothing wrong with just picking one or two and sticking to them.

And I think that's what a lot of beginners in wanting to study programming languages can fall into, they want to be the jack of all trades in programming. But there's this problem of a new language coming in all of the time and it can get very wiry trying to remember them all.

[–] bob742@programming.dev 0 points 1 year ago

We don't/ None of them are a significant improvement on PL/1 other that having objects (which hadn't been invented.) I blogged on this recently. https://bobbrowning.wordpress.com/2023/07/02/typescript-i-quite-like-it-plus-bonus-rant-about-languages/

[–] Whirlybird@aussie.zone -1 points 1 year ago (5 children)

The same reason anyone creates a new product in an existing market - they want money.

[–] SuperFola@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

I'll bite the bullet: I'm making my own scripting language for fun, as a learning experience and a tool for my own projects. If it can help others, great! But that's not my main goal.

In nearly 5 years working on it, I've made at most 400$ from donations and grants. Open source isn't a viable source of income, no matter what ; and programming language dev is even less profitable.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] yaniv@lemmy.ml -1 points 1 year ago

We should make one programming language to rule them all!

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards_2x.png

load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›