As a Dane I'm curious which ones you're thinking of. The ones which are typically associated with Denmark are C++ and PHP and neither were developed in Denmark and I think it would be fair to call PHP more Canadian than Danish. Ruby on Rails is another but Ruby was developed by Matz.
I'm not sure BETA or FCL are really in the "Best" category. :p
C# was developed by a Dane, but it wasn’t developed in Denmark. The creator of PHP was born in Greenland, but again the language was developed elsewhere.
C# wasn't created by just Anders Hejlsberg. There wouldn't be a C# without Scott Wiltamuth or a Peter Golde (and a lot others). Though I guess you could argue that there wouldn't be a "modern" C# without Mads Torgersen who is also Danish.
That being said. "GP" jokingly said languages which were considered "best". I'm not sure what C# is supposed to be "best" at? It's not Java and it's certainly not LISP.
IMHO C# is a very good, pragmatic language. It is not unique and groundbreaking like say Lisp, but it has a very well balanced set of features which makes is both productive and maintainable. It doesn’t have the level of boilerplate which make Java tedious, but its strong static type system makes it (IMHO) more maintainable than say Python for larger projects.
I think C# is a perfectly fine language, but as you say it's not really groundbreaking or unique. It's probably not even my top-five choice for general purpose language in 2024 but it's obviously gotten (is still getting) "the job done". If we're to praise Anders Hejlsberg's work I would personally pick Typescript above C#. Just look at how influential Typescript has been for global development in the previous decade.
It makes sense that most software innovation has so far happened in the USA, Europe and Japan, but I wonder what this map might look like by the end of the century...
Well for one, the world demography is deeply changing with population aging everywhere but a significant lag between countries which are already greying (Japan, Europe), countries which rely heavily on immigration to keep the median age stable (the USA) and countries which are just beginning to age but have large population (India, China, Brazil).
Most old people don’t work and a significant portion of them can’t. If you really think an aging population doesn’t have an impact on a country overall output, I have a bridge to sell you.
I think there is likely also bias in the data (what was considered significant) and inaccuracies in locations (many things assigned to Google’s head office).
In the US at least, programming languages were either developed by large corporations (Sun Microsystems, Apple, Google, Bell Labs, IBM) or research institutions (MIT) or Government (Ada, COBOL).
“Ada was originally designed by a team led by French computer scientist Jean Ichbiah of Honeywell under contract to the United States Department of Defense (DoD) from 1977 to 1983.”
This thread was about individuals making languages on their own and my point in this thread is most popular programming languages didn’t gain ground or mature until paid for and sponsored by an org or company.
DoD paid for it and can take credit for developing it.
Could be many reason I guess (after all, there's only 5.5 million Finns around), but the map is a bit pointless IMHO because it only counts university and research lab projects. Most recent languages I'm aware of (and which are actually useful in the real world) had been started by individuals in their spare time.
It lists languages designed by commercial companies too.
The main reason it avoids showing languages created by individuals is that it can be hard to narrow down their location. Also, it would count as doxing.
Rust, Zig, Odin, Nim are probably the most popular. It's also not surprising IMHO, most software is created to scratch a particular itch of an individual. Also specifically for programming languages, LLVM made it possible for individuals to build their own pet language with relatively little effort
but still get competitive performance and target platform coverage.
Rust though didn’t gain traction until Mozilla adopted it. I guess we could say individuals always created programming languages but majority are sponsored and paid by orgs/companies.
Before LLVM it was much harder for individuals to build competitive programming languages though (edited my original post with that afterthought, apologies)
Seemed like the definition of "programming language" was quite odd (given the title of the submission to HN is "Where are programming languages created?"), but then I noticed the actual title of the page is "Where does software innovation happen?" and is not restricted to programming languages.
While Kotlin is a Russian island the Kotlin programming language was created by JetBrains which is a Czech company founded by Russians with headquarters in Prague. You will find Kotlin on the map in the Prague circle.
As far as companies with a Russian origin go JetBrains and Yandex are at complete odds with each other. JetBrains condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine and suspended sales and R&D there shortly after the war broke out then left the country entirely as soon as they relocated the employees. Whereas Yandex stayed and as a result their home page today is chock-full of Russian propaganda. JetBrains may have originated in Russia but they have nothing to do with that country anymore so counting them in with Yandex is wrong.
Yandex has no way out of Russia. Most of its businesses are russian-targeted and going “full outside” makes zero sense for them, because to continue they’d have to bow before authorities anyway. As a media company, to condemn the war for them meant being instantly raided and re-owned, which sure isn’t far from truth, just was less dramatic.
Agreed that exiting the country was much easier for JetBrains who are more internationally focused. But my belief is that Yandex leadership made a strategic mistake in not spinning off their core businesses to Europe. They had a chance at establishing themselves as an EU-first search engine, mail provider and cloud that can compete at the equal footing with Google. Yet they blew it and now they are FSB owned in everything but name.
They shut down their St. Petersburg office and their Russian entity after the war started. At this point many of their people are outside Russia; all over Eastern Europe mostly. Lots of their Russian employees emigrated.
Notably, Roman Elizarov who was leading the Kotlin team and who is based in St. Petersburg actually left Jetbrains. It's not clear why; at the time he cited personal reasons. But reading between the lines, it could be because he was not able or willing to leave Russia.
As with so many things, this is basically a map of GDP / area.
In this case there's another layer on top of that where # of programming languages scales faster after a certain wealth threshold.
For instance, the city of Toronto has a GDP equivalent to a couple of specific countries (and larger than most countries), but created more programming languages than the equivalent countries.
Many Danes migrated to the UK a thousand years ago and now their descendants, who migrated to the US 200 hundred years ago, are also making great contributions in programming language theory. Lots to be proud of
Seems weird to attribute Haskell to Microsoft. Simon Peyton Jones joined MSR Cambridge in '98 (about a decade after the name "Haskell" was chosen), Erik Meijer joined Microsoft in 2000, and nobody else linked from the Wikipedia page for Haskell has obvious affiliations with Microsoft.
As far as I can tell, Haskell was an academic collaboration mostly between Jones (UCL briefly, mostly University of Glasgow), Wadler (University of Edinburgh), and Hudak (Yale).
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadI'm not sure BETA or FCL are really in the "Best" category. :p
That being said. "GP" jokingly said languages which were considered "best". I'm not sure what C# is supposed to be "best" at? It's not Java and it's certainly not LISP.
Why would it suddenly change?
I found this study [0] that examines the relationship between age and things like winning the Nobel prize or coming up with a "great invention".
Looks like there's a peak in the late 30s and that peak is slowly creeping up as the population ages.
But it might also be that you need a population of 20-year-olds to actually adopt the new inventions.
[0] https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/jones-ben/htm/a...
This thread was about individuals making languages on their own and my point in this thread is most popular programming languages didn’t gain ground or mature until paid for and sponsored by an org or company.
DoD paid for it and can take credit for developing it.
The main reason it avoids showing languages created by individuals is that it can be hard to narrow down their location. Also, it would count as doxing.
No, it doesn't. There's JetBrains, Eclipse foundation, Corel, etc.
Perl is one that comes to mind and it’s old.
Seemed like the definition of "programming language" was quite odd (given the title of the submission to HN is "Where are programming languages created?"), but then I noticed the actual title of the page is "Where does software innovation happen?" and is not restricted to programming languages.
Notably, Roman Elizarov who was leading the Kotlin team and who is based in St. Petersburg actually left Jetbrains. It's not clear why; at the time he cited personal reasons. But reading between the lines, it could be because he was not able or willing to leave Russia.
(I found the visualization hard to use, at least on mobile, so I used the CSV file)
In this case there's another layer on top of that where # of programming languages scales faster after a certain wealth threshold.
For instance, the city of Toronto has a GDP equivalent to a couple of specific countries (and larger than most countries), but created more programming languages than the equivalent countries.
*Many have migrated to the US on their way, but still…
As far as I can tell, Haskell was an academic collaboration mostly between Jones (UCL briefly, mostly University of Glasgow), Wadler (University of Edinburgh), and Hudak (Yale).