[COFF] was [TUHS] - History of popularity of C

[COFF] was [TUHS] - History of popularity of C

[clemc]

Moving to COFF where this discussion really belongs ...

On Sun, Jun 7, 2020 at 2:51 PM Nemo Nusquam <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 06/07/20 11:26, Clem Cole wrote (in part):
> > Neither language is used for anything in production in our world at this
> point.
>
> They seem to be used in some worlds: https://blog.golang.org/10years and
> https://www.rust-lang.org/production

Nemo,

That was probably not my clearest wording.  I did not mean to imply either
Go or Rust was not being used by any imagination.

My point was that in SW development environments that I reside (HPC, some
startups here in New England and the Bay Area, as well as Intel in general)
-- Go and Rust both have smaller use cases compared to C and C++ (much less
Python and Java for that matter).   And I know of really no 'money' project
that relies yet on either.   That does not mean I know of no one using
either; as I know of projects using both (including a couple of my own),
but no one that had done anything production or deployed 'mission-critical'
SW with one or the other.  Nor does that mean it has not happened, it just
means I have not seen been exposed.

I also am saying that in my own personal opinion, I expect it too, in
particular in Go in userspace code - possibly having a chance to push out
Java and hopefully pushing out C++ a bit.

My response was to an earlier comment about C's popularity WRT to C++.   I
answered with my experience and I widened it to suggest that maybe C++ was
not the guaranteed incumbent as the winner for production.  What I did not
say then, but I alluded too was the particularly since nothing in nearly 70
years has displaced Fortran, which >>is<< still the #1 language for
production codes (as you saw with the Archer statistics I pointed out).

Reality time ...  Intel, IBM, *et al,* spend a lot of money making sure
that there are >>production quality<< Fortran compilers easily available.
 Today's modern society is from Weather prediction to energy, to param,
chemistry, and physics.  As I have here and in other places, over my
career, Fortran has paid me and my peeps salary.   It is the production
enabler and without a solid answer to having a Fortran solution, you are
unlikely to make too much progress, certainly in the HPC space.

Let me take this in a slightly different direction.  I tend to use the
'follow the money' as a way to root out what people care about.
Where firms spend money to create or purchase tools to help their staff?
 The answer is in tools that give them return that they can measure.   So
using that rule:  What programming languages have the largest ecosystems
for tools that help find performance and operation issues?  Fortran, C, C++
have the largest that I know.   My guess would be Java and maybe
JavaScript/PHP would be next, but I don't know of any.

If I look at Intel, were do we spend money on the development tools:  C/C++
and Fortran (which all use a common backend) are #1.   Then we invest in
other versions of the same (GCC/LLVM) for particularly things we care
about.   After that, it's Python and used to be Java and maybe some
JavaScript.   Why? because ensuring that those ecosystems are solid on
devices that we make is good for us, even it means we help some of our
competitors' devices also.    But our investment helps us and Fortran,
C/C++ is where people use our devices (and our most profitable versions in
particular), so it's our own best interest to make sure there are tools to
bring out the best.

BTW:  I might suggest you take a peek at where other firms do the same
thing, and I think you'll find the follow the money rule is helpful to
understand what people care the most about.
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