On Mar 12, 9:44 pm, John Doty <j...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> > both
> > because of the associated network economies and because of the
> > economies of scope, so some small number of languages will be the
> > mainstream languages ... and they could well be the very best ones
> > available, or just the lucky ones, or some mix of the two by various
> > degrees.
> I don't think it's luck.
It certainly wasn't entirely luck ... the general shape of the
strategic terrain gave an advantage to some families of strategies
over others ... but blind faith is the only basis for arguing that
luck did not play some role in each of the languages that are now
dominant in various problem areas.
For example, the freedom afforded to the early developers of C and
Unix because they were working in R&D for a monopolist pursuing a
patent thicket strategy as part of protecting their monopoly
position ... that very freedom implies that if some other programming
challenge had attracted the fascination of a very small handful of
programmers at an early stage and there would have been no C and no
Unix.
And without C, where would AWK be? And without AWK, where would Perl
be?
And that is just a pruning that we know could easily have happened ...
there also must have been prunings along those lines that did occur of
languages that would have established their own lineage among
programming languages.
Indeed, had C and Unix come along in more or less the form they
did ... but merely have been delayed, things may have been very
different ... and, indeed, in either direction. Maybe if Unix was less
full elaborated by the time that a machine filling the niche of the
IBM PC came along, it would have been a better fit earlier to the
hardware, and have come to dominate the microcomputer market.
And if one lineage of computer languages ****fts, the strategic
op****tunities for all other languages also ****fts.
Its certainly not *blind* luck ... there are selective pressures that
are not internal to the collection of rival languages ... but luck
obviously plays some role.
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