• Most people choose a language based on quality rather than what everyone else is using
• Good languages are necessarily well known (if you build it, they will come?)
• Large corporations, which make up a large segment of the market and can basically anoint programming languages to dominance, have the ability or inclination to choose a good programming language (rather than, e.g., a language which has a strong promotional machine behind it or a language whose backer offers lots of enterprise support)
• Attractiveness to amateurs is equal to all other factors in determining a programming language's quality (regardless of what you think of the language, this is a large part of PHP's popularity)
The thesis here is simply false for any reasonable definition of "good." The only way you can make it true is to "#define good popular", in which case it's tautological.
For example, the reason there is still so much COBOL in production is not that the language is awesome and people choose it of their own free will — in fact, the opposite is generally considered to be the case even by COBOL experts — it's simply entrenched. These systems would not be written in COBOL if they were being developed today, but because they happen to have been written in COBOL's heyday, people still use COBOL. The market chooses COBOL for these positions because of the horrific cost of rewriting everything from the ground-up, not because of anything related to COBOL itself.
First, thank you for reading. This article was meant entirely to spur discussion so I thank you for taking the time to discuss.
Second, I don't think an argument that most people choose based on quality is pertinent to the theory. The theory just states that the market decides. It does not infer than any metric the market uses is inherently better or worse than others.
Third, your COBOL example is explicitly excluded from the theory as not being in a free-market. Thus it is fading away slowly. If it were truly up to the market (no external regulation from business interests) it would be dead.*
* In this case the market is defined as the direct consumers of the programming language. The programmers themselves. As opposed to indirect consumers (organizations).
It states that the market decides what? The article repeatedly suggests that what the market decides is which language is "good" or "better," which can only be true if people choose based on quality.
If the market choice is only loosely correlated with quality, then looking at the market tells us nothing about which languages are good (since "good" is a qualitative judgment).
There are only two ways I can see for market penetration to be relevant to the discussion of which languages are better:
1. The market chooses based on quality
2. "Good" is synonymous with "popular"
Otherwise you're measuring one thing and then announcing another. Market position is just popularity, and is only a reliable indicator of the things that determine popularity. If people don't choose based on the quality of a language, then looking at popularity to figure out which languages are good is like looking at the eating habits of the average American and concluding that Big Macs are the most nutritionally balanced food around because they're in the dominant market position.
Step one to making this kind of statement: give some evidence that the language ecosystem actually works as a free market.
First of all changing languages is almost always a large investment. That removes the "free" from your free market analogy so many of the assumptions you are making are completely unfounded.
Also, "free" as in choice, not "free" as in cost.
I understood what you meant by "free" but you seem to be discounting the high cost of making that choice.
You can examine the language ecosystem as a market but if you do you see immediately that it is inherently a lock in market.
Once you choose a language it's very high cost to change languages.
It's also high cost to choose a language that's not already popular, recruiting is more difficult and you will not have as much 3rd party library support.
So you have both "lock in" and large advantages for existing large players. Sure, it's technically still a "free market" because it's not regulated by the state but this kind of market doesn't have the behavior you are assuming.
What evidence do you have that these kinds of markets optimize for "better" languages?
What you might find is the market aggregate is a lagging indicator or that any summary is void of true detail.
Besides the language measurement quanta here is so far apart, no?
Say it is very popular now but it is difficult to use and no one enjoys using it. If the theory holds true, a new language will come around gain popularity with hardware firmware developers and Gabview will fade off into the distance.
For very small values of "useful" and "good"...
