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Comment by slapresta | Hacker News Reader

Code collaboration tools have a strong network effect due to them being ultimately social tools, and we expect categories affected by the network effect to have winner/losers mechanics. Of course, they don't actually have to, but it's a common expectation and a common outcome.

For equivalents to "code collaboration tools", instead of "programming languages", "text editors" and "build tools", try "social networks" (Facebook won, MySpace lost), "network protocols" (HTTP won, FTP and Gopher lost) or "spoken languages" (English won)

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It seems to me that programming languages have far stronger network effects than any other example you or I are throwing out. If one project uses git and another mercurial and they want to work together, there are ways (hg-git, plain old patches). Try incorporating some java code in a ruby project, however. No possible way that is going to fly. Yet, we (at least the hacker news crowd) haven't declared any language as "winner". I really hope version control does not stagnate at git.

>Try incorporating some java code in a ruby project, however. No possible way that is going to fly.

I don't think this example is convincing. There are too many languages to expect arbitrary pairings to combine well. (Not to mention the fact that googling "java ruby" returns JRuby, which apparently lets you do just what you describe.)

I do agree with your last point: Even when we look at similar languages, like Python and Ruby, we don't declare one a winner, generally.

> English won

English did not won.

It might be widely spoken in the 21st century, but so were Greek, Egyptian, Latin, French, Portuguese and Spanish once upon a time.

I might be writing this in English now, but saying it won implies no change in common language will ever happen again.

Given the history of mankind and some of the countries I had the pleasure to visit on my life so far, I doubt it.

Specially since most of the people I know, do happen to speak three foreign languages on average.

> English did not won.

Apparently not.

Well, yes. Everything else I've mentioned is also dependant on cultural contexts that may vary dramatically over time. I surely hope Facebook hasn't won forever.

For what it's worth, I'm not a native English speaker.

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