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Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

> Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++. The good languages have been those that were designed for their own creators: C, Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp.

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Choice of programming language is almost always a decision of whether you want to stand alone, or whether you want to stand on the shoulders of the multitudes. Some of which are indeed geniuses. Standing alone is always a poor choice. Not understanding that means not understanding that programming is a highly social activity.

With the exceptions of Perl and perhaps Ada, I still tend to agree with this. C++ is only okay because of the libraries that make it suck less.

What the statement doesn't do is support the opinion that Java will be unpopular for being a bad language.

The thing that made Java succeed was the write-once-run-everywhere JVM and the huge effort spent by Sun, IBM, and others to make the JVM as good as it is.

Does a programming language have to live vibrantly for 3 decades to be "good"? I don't think so. Use it while it's good, then move on to or create the next good thing.

The longer it lives, the more your investment in learning thoroughly it pays off. But languages also have a tendency to accumulate features until taking on a cancer-ridden look. I probably stick to a given "main workhorse" language for about a decade on average. So I would agree that if a language gets a decade of being good, it is about as good as you can expect.

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