Because It's Not Fun Enough: why languages fail
It's a good tour from a man who has been editing this industry's books forever, and near the end of it, Oram quotes Simon Peyton Jones, who observes that a language's adoption is "very weakly connected to its technical merits," and that the social and economic factors do the actual deciding. That quote is the article, and it's a little surprising that it's buried so far into the content; maybe engineering for human nature makes it difficult to make that quote the leading thesis because we don't want to read that quite so bluntly, but it's true. Language adoption is not solely technical - it's technical and human.
- ▪It's a good tour from a man who has been editing this industry's books forever, and near the end of it, Oram quotes Simon Peyton Jones, who observes that a language's adoption is "very weakly connected to its technical merits," and that the
- ▪That quote is the article, and it's a little surprising that it's buried so far into the content; maybe engineering for human nature makes it difficult to make that quote the leading thesis because we don't want to read that quite so bluntl
- ▪Language adoption is not solely technical - it's technical and human.
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| Original publisher | bytecode.news |
| Canonical URL | https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/08/because-it-s-not-fun-enough |
| Publication time | Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:27:47 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-10T12:10:42.163Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-10T12:10:42.163Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
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| Cluster | 2W9xH2204mbm · 1 stories |
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| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
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Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Because It's Not Fun EnoughBy dreamreal|August 10, 2026|Updated 11:54am EThistorylanguagepsychologysoftware engineeringAndrew Oram wrote a two-part series for the Linux Professional Institute asking why programming languages rise and fall (parts one and two.) It says, roughly, that C, C++, and JavaScript are immortal (for now!), with Java a maybe; COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC, and Perl lived respectable lives and got sent upstate to retire on a farm; Pascal, Objective-C, PL/I, Ada, and Tcl were false starts, with Ruby somewhere on the bubble.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at bytecode.news.
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