Comments for If Programming Languages Were Harry Potter Characters - The Slightly Disgruntled Scientist

Or subroutines, since you call them whenever you want them. Or maybe the objects in object oriented programming. And hey, is it just a coincidence that Object Oriented Programming = OOP = Order Of the Phoenix lol?!

Sysadmins, they keep everything working and people treat them like shit.

Perfect :D (So does that make maintenance programmers the equivalent of the elixir of life?)

The weird thing is that D has Voldemort Types. http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/...

I was surprised at rust being there but no Go.... While they are very different with different-ish targets they are of the same time... and usually the same circles

I think Go should be Harry Potter. I do not believe Python will kill C, but Go might.

FWIW, I like C — the language, specifically, maybe not so much the ecosystem.

But consider what it means for a language to be alive, or really more to the point: dead; and what characterises its personality (things which, for now, are only tenuous metaphors anyway). There's plenty of Cobol out there, there's probably even the occasional new project in it, but in terms of language livelihood, it's right down one end of the scale. "Very nearly every" financial transaction I conduct probably involves it, but the programmers who find opportunity in it are the equivalent of necromancers.

It's not just the number of projects, or the proliferation of the devices they run on, but things like... are new students being taught it, or will they learn computer science and engineering paradigms through the lens of Java, or Python, or Haskell? Out of the volume of projects started this year, which languages will feature the most? When new ideas are expressed in academia, what language are they expressed in?

While there is no end of people who will declare C to be a Dead Language, sure, it's still alive. But it's no longer alive in the ways that many other languages are. Those "very nearly every" computers are, by themselves, completely taken for granted and pretty much invisible. No-one would care about them if it weren't for Languages That Aren't C.

If you offered someone a modern smartphone or desktop machine with everything that isn't C removed, most people would politely decline a very useless device. Therefore I don't regard these things as "keeping C from dying out altogether." But there are devices out there that are made more useful solely by C (eg. the World's Greatest Toaster, probably). They are the "little, unregarded things," to which I refer.

It's useful enough that I keep going back to it...

Rust was written in OCaml, and is now self-hosting.
FORTRAN was written in assembly language.
Python has implementations written in python and java (and maybe C#? What's IronPython written in anyway?).
Haskell was written in LazyML and is now self hosting.

That's 3 and a bit out of 14. I don't know about all the rest. So it's closer to 80%. C's important, but let's not exaggerate things.

I actually almost went down this road, but my partner suggested that LISP is more like Tom Riddle's diary. Think about it: it actually started life as an ink-and-paper implementation, until eventually it was given "life" when Steve Russell implemented eval.