Ruby's wide-scale adoption has been driven by Rails, which is backed first by 37Signals, and now by any army of freelance converts from PHP. And now JRuby is being backed by Sun, too.

The announcement of Perl's death has been widely exaggerated: go ask your local Unix admin if Perl is dead. Now, it's not generally considered a language appropriate for application development anymore, which is one of the great "No duh, Sherlock!" realizations that our industry has gone through.

Perl's popularity came because it was basically the first-of-breed. It came out of Larry Wall's collection of shell scripts, converted a bunch of sysadmins from straight shell scripting, and leveraged that toehold to become a "real" language. For years, it dominated as a system administration language that could be cranked out quickly, at least partially because it had an expansive and easy-to-use library system (CPAN). Even if you could come up with a better language for system scripting, you would have to port large swaths of CPAN before you would practically edge out Perl. So nothing really made it to the surface to compete against Perl for a long time. And O'Reilly had a big hand in evangelizing Perl, although it didn't offer "commercial support" in the form of consulting.

Python is the interesting case, because it came out after Perl, but still managed to gain a fairly significant following. It's still not terribly widely adopted and particularly not widely adopted in industry, so it doesn't manage to be a counterpoint to the basic argument.

~~ Robert.

skaller wrote:

On Sun, 2007-11-04 at 22:39 +0100, Oliver Bandel wrote:

Zitat von skaller <skaller@users.sourceforge.net>:

I think so, but I'm only guessing. Ubuntu Linux has commercial
support by Canonical, Fedora by Red-Hat, I believe this has
some impact on their popularity. C# is supported by MS,
Java by Sun.

[...]

What's with C, C++, Perl?


C++ was developed by AT&T. HP pushed it into ANSI Standardisation
so they could us it in certain contracts. It went up to a joint
ANSI/ISO process later. There are many many commercial supporters
of C and C++ software.

Perl is dead... maybe *because* it lacked commercial support
as a language. 

There are certainly popular Open Source languages without
commercial support for the language development though: 
Python and Ruby for example.