Hacker News Reader

Java was the only way to write applets and code for feature-phones early on. Nobody thought of writing application servers in java in early 90s, java was supposed to be the way to write code for internet of things.

C++ was the easiest way to write kinda-OO code and use C libraries. Then it became de-facto standard for gamedev and desktop app programming.

In Linux world it's still the case that if you want to write a desktop app you should write it in C/C++. Use any other language and you will struggle against the dependency management and package managers forever.

Python is the only clear example of succeeding without a platform out of these languages, and the fact that after decades still Python is less popular than PHP shows that historic accidents and having a good platform is more important than any quality of the language.

On the other hand Perl is dead so maybe it's not as bad :)

For all that, you can still get an awful lot done in a dead language!

The (excellent) libraries are python's platform

I would have avoided python if I could... But I can't avoid numpy/scipy etc etc

For a lot of users, Python is its own platform. As a so called "scientific" programmer, when I'm programming, I'm very much "inside" Python. I don't need to know or care very much about the details of the platform that it's running on. I start up my IDE or Jupyter and the rest of the system melts away.

This may be because Python lends itself to bring used in integrated environments such as Jupyter.

Was Python's package management unusually good compared to other languages at the time?

Python took the shell scripting platform from Perl just like PHP took the web scripting platform. It then extended to web servers (e.g., Django as an alternative to Ruby on Rails) and ML, but that was later.

Depends on the time, CPAN was far better than setuptools. It was even better than dealing with RPM, early on.

RubyGems was the package manager that was really amazing and changed everything IMO. pip didn’t even exist until almost a decade later after that.

>Java was the only way to write applets and code for feature-phones early on.

That's not how it got its popularity. Applets died very soon (the novelty lasted like 1-2 years), and feature-phone apps were never a big thing. Unlike e.g. mobile apps that quickly overtook the desktop, feature-phone J2ME apps at the time were a peanuts business (and there were other ways, like native APIs from Palm, Blackerry, and Windows mobile edition - of yore, not their post-iPhone smartphone OS).

Java, even back in 2000, was big in the enterprise space and remained so (which is why Sun quickly emphasized that and let the applet sdk languish).

> In Linux world it's still the case that if you want to write a desktop app you should write it in C/C++. Use any other language and you will struggle against the dependency management and package managers forever.

I do agree in a very general sense, but there are definitely a few good options or there for desktop software.

For example, Lazarus/FreePascal is one of the best solutions for writing GUI apps even nowadays. It's a shame that it's dead as far as market share is concerned, even if it has a community around it, is open source and still receives regular updates with pretty good platform support.

Though i guess you could say the same about any technology stack that produces executables that are for the most part statically linked and don't complicate dependency management.

Of course, Java with Swing also hasn't disappeared anywhere and is still perfectly capable of producing most desktop software as long as there is any sort of a JDK or JRE on the device. There's also JavaFX/OpenJFX which is supposed to be more modern, but I've experienced more issues with it in comparison to Swing.

For Java, JVM was the "platform". I still remember learning Java in university - what left an impression on me was that my first ever university homework where I used Java (i.e. non-trivial project) ran perfectly on first successful compilation [+]. GC is huge help, especially if you don't use smart pointers (which were far less prevalent at the time).

[+] to clarify, I was a somewhat experienced programmer, this was one of the final year projects, for distributed systems or parallel computing I believe. A simple system without doubt, but still, a system not a "hello world". Something that I wouldn't have expected to work on first try, had it been written in C.

Yes. I like this in Java, and in Rust, and it's annoying for me in languages like Python where you mostly don't have this. I want the compiler to tell me my program is nonsense, so then I can fix it, rather than wait until the program has done most of its work and then, oh, did you notice this needs to be an integer but you provided a string? Sorry, program crash, fix the bug and run the whole thing again.

But of course although it's the default in Java, and not provided out of the box in Python, I also wrote some web framework stuff that adds these runtime errors to Java (by using Reflection to make decisions at runtime instead) and I've seen Python code with more type safety that would tell you earlier that there's a problem. So it's ultimately not only a matter of programming language although that does definitely set the tone.

I think platform in this argument is meant to mean something users obtain and install apps (or websites) into. The JVM is not a platform really, it's a runtime. For a while the JRE was sort of a platform because users downloaded it separately, but that hasn't been true for a long time and yet Java is still popular.

It is almost forgotten now, but the platform which carried Java to critical mass was the browser. Java successfully pivoted to server-side, but initially it was considered a client-side language.

C++ was the preferred application development language on Windows.

Python is popular because of the numeric and ML ecosystem.

I would say that in the enterprise software world Java was an irrelevant toy before the pivot to server side. At that point though, whoosh stratosphere

I'm not sure that's quite right. I feel like there was a decent span of time where many desktop apps were written in Java (with AWT or Swing), particularly enterprise apps where you valued development speed and ease of deployment more than a slick UI or high performance.

My $JOB is maintaining such a desktop CRUD app that's been in use for the past 20 years. It uses a Swing (via a proprietary higher-level framework) for its GUI. Over the years it's accreted a few dozen services (also in Java) in its orbit, but the central GUI app and its data-base still remain and continue to be extended as new requirements arise.

I don't think ML was what it is today when python started.

Right, definitely not.

From my perspective, Python became popular as the simplest and friendliest general scripting language along the lines of Perl or TCL, and the easiest for somebody familiar with other languages like C or Java to pick up.

If I wanted to do something just a bit too fiddly for a shell script, I'd reach for Python (and still do, although I've recently started using Node too).

Perl initially became popular as the best text-wrangling language for CGI scripts and the like, but (I think) was a bit too weird to be a general-purpose hit for the masses like Python. Likewise Tcl/Tk was great for whipping up quick UIs, but both parts seemed a little too weird to stand on their own.

Ruby was another strong contender; I think Python was already too well-established to be displaced by Ruby, but Ruby found its audience via Rails (which I'm guessing is better than Django).

Rails was the first of that type of web framework. Django and all similar frameworks are Rails clones. At that time Rails was the killer app for Ruby. Unfortunately for Ruby the other languages were willing to put in the effort to copy it, and Rails is no longer a unique advantage.

Django and all similar frameworks are Rails clones.

Hmm, are you sure? I’m not saying you’re wrong, because I’m not sure myself! I heard of Django before I ever heard of Rails but that doesn’t mean much.

Wikipedia suggests they were released at around the same time -- Django started slightly earlier, Rails open sourced earlier.

Zope was the leader in python long before Django or rails. Since 1999

ColdFusion and JSP and PHP were dominant for a long time before Rails as well.

Aha, yes, I was getting mixed up between Zope and Django!

> It is almost forgotten now, but the platform which carried Java to critical mass was the browser.

I'm still confused by the cycle of

- You can run Java applets in a web browser!

- Ew. Time to stop doing that.

- I've had a brilliant idea! We need a bytecode-based VM in the browser so a web page can run arbitrary code.

- I'll call it "WebAssembly".

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the problem with applets was that they were too powerful and it took eons for vulnerabilities to be fixed.

- Now you can go back to run Java applets in a web browser!

Other than security, the other bad thing about applets was that they were very slow to start, and required a Java runtime that did not come bundled with the browser - you had to download an installer for it manually, install it, and then the thing was constantly nagging you about updates (and, IIRC, the updating agent or whatever it was that sat in my tray noticeably degraded the machine's performance even if nothing was using JRE).

Java has all the security logic INSIDE THE VM.

That's the big difference.

Here:

- You can run Java applets in a web browser!

-> Yeah, so? There are all crap, slow to start, big on resource bloat, slow to draw, and don't offer much).

-> Ew. Time to stop doing that.

Then 15+ years passed, during which JS became the dominant way to build CRUD/Enterprise/form-based/and more apps, got big features (from WebRTC to an embedded DB, and from accelerated canvas and 2D graphics to MIDI). And it even hit big on the server too.

Then: - I've had a brilliant idea! We need a bytecode-based VM in the browser so a web page can run arbitrary code.

WebAssembly, is faster than Java Applets was back then, has easier ties to the DOM for UI (as opposed to being a sandbox), can be used to supplement conventionally written web apps, and is not tied to a single company.

So, quite a lot of differences due to time, and also in the characteristics of the technologies involved.

Well, it’s not hard being faster than 20 years old tech. Also, webassembly still doesn’t have proper bindings to the DOM (and seriously, at the time we could be happy that a static DOM could be displayed), and java is one of the very few languages that actually has a proper specification allowing independent implementations, and it is not just saying that “the spec is whatever code we write”.

So these comparisons frankly make no sense as every such shortcoming could have been easily fixed in 20 years.

>Well, it’s not hard being faster than 20 years old tech.

Yes, but it was even more hard to make Java applets run with any acceptable speed in 1997, which is what mattered for their deprecation. Understadingly people didn't just say "let's suffer them for 10 years until the hardware catches up to make them tolerable".

>Also, webassembly still doesn’t have proper bindings to the DOM

Yes, but still better than what applets had :-)

>So these comparisons frankly make no sense as every such shortcoming could have been easily fixed in 20 years.

It would make even less sense for people in 1997-1999 to stick with applets because "such shortcomings will be easily fixed in 20 years". People use what works now, or at least offers a serious advantage despite the shortcomings. Java applets then didn't offer much.

> Understadingly people didn't just say "let's suffer them for 10 years until the hardware catches up to make them tolerable".

It’s funny because that is essentially what happened. Other than flash (which suffered essentially from the same shortcomings as applets, but at least had a productive environment to create them), there was nothing that replaced these technologies for many years to come. Canvas rendering came much later and only with much more recent browsers did it have acceptable performance. It is not accident that many people long for the old web which was strangely more interactive in some cases than what we have today.

Don’t get me wrong, java applets were shitty. But we sort of threw it all away instead of fixing it, which in hindsight seems to have been an easier road (since the JVM has always been the state of the art runtime, and JS engines had to catch up from zero). DOM integration into an object oriented language would have been much easier than what webassembly does through JS bindings, and lack of security was frankly more of a mindset back then, and the jvm could have been sandboxed just as “easily”* as js engines are.

* it is a hard thing to do, but it happened to JS engines because the money was there. Integrating the JVM with proper sandboxing would have required less money/energy.

The problem with Java applets was not the use of bytecode or a VM. The problem was that it was slow to start so you looked at a grey rectangle for a long time before anything happened. Flash was much snappier, which is why it won out over Java. Flash also had better development tools targeted multimedia and games.

Python is popular because their teach it in US schools and colleges as a next best thing after BASIC int terms of ease. During ML uprise Python became a common denominator between mostly US-based scholars.

>It is almost forgotten now, but the platform which carried Java to critical mass was the browser

I think that's backwards. I was there. Aside from a few e.g. banking and government applets one was forced to use and a couple of exceptions, applets never got anywhere and died fast.

Enterprise Java became what Java is all about very very soon. Java landed in 1996. Servlets/Tomcat landed in 1998.

By 2000 there was plenty of enterprise Java development - in fact that was the year MS created its own Java copy, in the form of C#/.NET after having tried to extend their version of Java for the Windows platform.

Back when Flash was called Shockwave, it was competing with Java applets for browser games. It did lose, but it was out there.

Minor nit, Shockwave wasn't the same as Flash. All three plus ActiveX overlapped in their time on the market, which is hair-raising to think about.

Was Shockwave a platform for Flash then, or something?

I don't know any technical details here, but from a user perspective Shockwave did turn into Flash. The Flash file extension "swf" even stands for "ShockWave Flash".

Shockwave was Flash's larger brother, feature wise. Shockwave stuff could contain Flash files, but Shockwave could do things Flash couldn't, or could do them earlier. (And if I remember correctly Shockwave came first, and when Macromedia aquired it they then build Flash)

It was two separate products with separate origins. Macromedia had Shockwave and then they purchased Flash (which was called Splash then) and branded it Shockwave Flash.

Shockwave was somewhat similar to Flash, but it was developed for the "multimedia" CD-ROM's, which meant the files was generally too big for online. Flash was much more compact which is why it won out.

Shockwave = plugin for playing Macromedia Director content. Director was a GUI builder for interactive multimedia apps which were programmed in a custom language called Lingo.

Flash was originally called FutureSplash, if I recall correctly. When Macromedia bought it they rebranded it to fit their general branding theme, hence the confusion. Flash wasn't really intended to be an app platform, it started out as a vector animation format, but later they added scripting using a dialect of JavaScript called ActionScript.

Most users ended up with the Flash plugin but not the Shockwave plugin. Macromedia Director was huge in its day - my first programming job involved writing Lingo - but it died out pretty quick when the internet started taking off.

> Flash was originally called FutureSplash

So had the renaming taken place now in stead of twenty years ago, it would be called F7lash in stead of just Flash.

Notably, Linux support for Shockwave was missing.

Just a minor nitpick Rust still has miles to go before it catches with Python or Go or Java, so not yet in the same league. Most of the rust crates today depends on C, so it’s not going to replace C in next 2 decades, but will still depend on C.

Hopefully it will start replacing C going forward but in that space Rust is competing with Zig and Nim.

> Zig and Nim

Two languages almost nobody uses. It doesn't seem likely it's actually competing with them in that case.

You hardly hear about Zig or Nim. Are they actually being used in production?

I do not know about Zig, but Nim is used in production at multiple companies - biotech, cryptocurrencies, finance, had an attempted commercial video game app, etc., etc. See here [1] for example.

[1] https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Organizations-using-Nim

Rust isn't competing with Zig and Nim just like C isn't competing with Rust.

> And I have to agree: State management is a huge part of CRUD apps.

I see this point come up often, but it doesn’t really line up with my own experiences. I find the explicit state control in functional languages makes it much easier to write enterprise CRUD.

CRUD is about state, but typically the mutable state is in the database, not the application layer.

UNIX became popular because it was free beer with source tapes.

Had UNIX been written in PL/I, Mesa or BLISS, those languages would be "C" today.

Oh, how I miss BLISS. It was the first language I learned that got rid of the silly distinction between statements and expressions. What a revelation! Everything was an expression. Everything returned a value. I guess a bit like Ruby, but 40 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLISS

https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/classes/cs520/spring06/bliss.pdf

Elixir possibly has some of this flavour. If and switch are both expressions and return values. I dig it.

I think it is that way in almost every FP language (eg. Scala, Haskell, Kotlin, etc)

> Everything returned a value. I guess a bit like Ruby

Like C, isn't it? Assignments return values! Still feels weird AF to those of us who started on BASIC and Pascal.

> Go did that with it's own properties

Go got popular because it was a Google thing and everyone fanboyed hard over that.

What happened to Dart, then?

It targeted the front-end, which lots of programmers don't give a shit about.

It got betrayed by Google itself when the Chrome team dropped support for DartVM support.

Then AdWords team which had just gone through GWT => Dart rewrite, kind of rescued the project from closing down, after the key designers left.

Finally Flutter team kind of gave a new life to Dart, which made Dart only relevant in the context of Flutter.

While Google's support was definitely a factor, Go also had some important language features going for it. Most importantly it is targeting a relatively empty niche in the programming language landscape, i.e. that of high performance, close to the metal languages with little performance overhead, while still being easy to write. "Easy to write" for 80% comes down to being memory-safe, unlike C/C++. If you're in that niche, you have few alternatives. The other options for mainstream memory-safe languages are interpreted scripting languages and Java-style jitted languages. Go easily beats both in resource consumption without being much harder to program in. Rust isn't really comparable because while it is memory-safe its memory management system still forces the programmer to think about the memory and resource usage, thus being slower to program in.

I have always used Pascal for that

But no one else does

Go is just shitty Pascal, change my mind.

On a more serious note. I decided to read Delphi documentation recently because I’m old enough to hear a lot about it, but not quite old enough to write anything in it. It had discriminated unions. It did! I can’t imagine my life without them, I write stuff exclusively in Ocaml-like languages, so the only question that I have in my mind is “how the hell we managed to go backwards?” It’s so weird.

Go has some restrictions, but all in all it's a great little pragmatic language, which solves a lot of practical problems (utf-8 strings, concurrency, garbage collection, cross compilation, single binary deployment, performance, readability) and which I can easily keep in my head as opposed to most of the other languages I've used in my career.

In that way it's like a Delphi for the modern world.

No, Free Pascal is Delphi for the modern world.

Of course it had. Turbo Pascal had, AFAICR. (Probably because, at a guess, Wirth-standard Pascal did; though I'm less certain about that.)

How is that different from eg. D? Or the myriad other GCd AOT compiled languages?

Did google still have fans among the technical crowd when golang launched? I'd expect Rob Pike and Ken Thompson to be the fanboy-attractors rather than google.

Java and the JVM had considerable marketing investiment to become a popular choice among the enterprise segment.

Python was taught in many universities for its flat learning curve, then started to be used in academic research.

Even without an unrelated platform, like JS and the browser, they had something to catapult their adoption.

> Python was taught in many universities for its flat learning curve, then started to be used in academic research.

Python was used in academia long before it was used for teaching. “Courting” scientists was done from extremely early on in the language history (matrix-sig was founded in 1995) and the “extended” indexing added at their request (auto-tupling and slicing predate PEPs as those were introduced for and by Python 2).

The Spark data processing platform was/is popular, and is written in Scala, a.k.a. FP.

Java & Go are sponsored by megacorps; their success or otherwise has little to do with the language's strength in isolation. They are more examples in favour of successful platforms being leveraged to promote a language.