Lengthy-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:
Recalling a previous Pc Historical past Museum look on the evolution of programming languages, Doug Meil ponders the age-old query of Why Are There So Many Programming Languages? in a brand new Communications of the ACM weblog put up.
“It is price noting and admiring the audacity of PL/I (1964),” Meil writes, “which was aiming to be that ‘one good programming language.’ The identify says all of it: Programming Language 1. There needs to be no want for two, 3, or 4. [Meil expands on this thought in Lessons from PL/I: A Most Ambitious Programming Language.] Although PL/I‘s plans of turning into the Highlander of laptop programming did not play out just like the designers meant, they have been nonetheless pulling on a key thread in software program: why so many languages? That query was already being requested way back to the early 1960’s.”
Certainly one of PL/I’s largest followers was Digital Analysis Inc. (DRI) founder Gary Kildall, who crafted the PL/I-inspired PL/M (Programming Language for Microcomputers) in 1973 for Intel. However IBM priced PL/I greater than the languages it sought to switch, contributing to PL/I’s failure to realize traction. (Alongside the traces of how IBM’s take care of Microsoft gave rise to a worth disparity that was the undoing of Kildall’s CP/M OS, bundled with each PC in a ‘non-royalty’ deal. Home windows was priced at $40 whereas CP/M was supplied ‘a la carte’ at $240.) As a comp.lang.pl1 poster defined in 2006, “The reality of the matter is that Gresham’s Regulation: ‘Unhealthy cash drives out good’ or Ruskin’s precept: ‘The hoi polloi all the time desire an inferior, low cost product over a superior, dearer one‘ are what govern right here.”
