🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <406@ubbpc.UUCP>, wgh@ubbpc.UUCP (William G. Hutchison) writes:
> [list showing that many "successful" languages are "better" if developed
>  by a small group ]
> 
>  I still maintain that this supports my earlier thesis: that committee-
> designed languages fail and individually-designed languages succeed.  Now that
> I have defined success and failure more clearly, more people might agree.

I have sometimes agreed with this thesis, but I really wonder if it's just
another truism.  There are a lot of languages out there that were developed
by individuals (Snobol, Icon, Euclid, Trac, FP, etc.) that probably would be
considered successes under your first criterion, but never achieved wide-scale
popularity, for numerous reasons, including lack of publicity or machine
implementations, or similarity to other languages.  Sure, some of the
individually designed languages are popular, and are "well-designed", but I
don't buy that it is because of how many people designed it.  I wonder if C
would be popular today, if there hadn't been a university computing revolution
around Unix, and I'm not convinced that Modula 2 would be any more successful
than any other Pascal successor, if it had been designed by anybody other than
Wirth.  Did IBM become the number one computer company in the world because
it built better machines and better software?  I don't think so.  The right
kind of salesmanship did it, and I think that this is true of programming
languages as well.