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Comment by mstade | Hacker News Reader

> With the exception of Go, every language that has become popular in the past 10 years, built on something else.

And Go probably wouldn't have half the range it enjoys today without the massive reach and coffers of Google. That's not a snark, or a critique even, just a reflection of the difficulty of breaking through in this space and indeed a comment to support your assertion that in order to succeed in this space today you probably have to build on or successfully interoperate with an already established platform.

If Go didn't have the backing of Google, I doubt it'd have half the audience it enjoys today; Rob Pike notwithstanding. Case in point: Plan 9.

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Not everyone is motivated by success. Grigori Perelman?

IMO people interested in success should be suspect. It’s weird to me that people would go through life seeking attention for invention that will not last much beyond their death.

If anyone here believes their efforts at even a Google size company are forever: 80% of the companies listed as Fortune 500 firms do not exist anymore.

Other than a few key discoveries, for a variety of reasons, none of the work at those firms is considered of value.

>IMO people interested in success should be suspect. It’s weird to me that people would go through life seeking attention for invention that will not last much beyond their death.

Err, the attention and success can help them get money, funding for their projects, and other niceties much before their death, so there's that.

> Not everyone is motivated by success. Grigori Perelman?

I don't see how he wasn't motivated by success. He wasn't solving recreational math puzzles.

True, his definition of success didn't include money or prestigious prizes. Still, proving a great and long-standing theorem is a way greater accomplishment than becoming a millionaire.

Plan 9 is a little different because it's harder to flitter between operating systems than it is programming languages.

That said, I'm not discounting what you're saying about Go's popularity either.

My point with mentioning Plan 9 was that even with luminaries such as Rob Pike, success is not guaranteed. Having a huge organization backing you doesn’t hurt. (Ok, granted, plan 9 had bell labs but I posit a research arm is altogether different from the commercial entity that is google.)

It's interesting you bring Plan 9 up, because it was closed source for a long time, who knows if it was long enough to kill interest. Probably another factor for success.

I got that. I was saying there were a lot of other mitigating circumstances that contributed towards Plan 9’s lack of success that would be specific to Plan 9 and thus not relevant to general purpose programming languages. So it’s not really a great example.

I do think your general point does have merit and the computer industry is littered with examples of great languages that have either failed to gain traction or just fallen out of favour for whatever reason.

I think what the OP meant was “cases in point: Alef & Limbo”. (These were languages that were introduced with Plan 9 and its successor Inferno, that didn’t catch on.)

point: utf8 (unicode)

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