What Makes a Language Hot?
It seems that there are many factors in what languages are hot.
We can boil them all down to one statement. A language is hot because many
programmers are interested in programming in it. From this definition, we
can also look at the factors that make a language desirable to program in.
Also, the factors
that make a language hot may not be the same that keep it hot. For example,
both Fortran and COBOL became hot languages for ease of use reasons.
They were simply easier to use that their alternatives. However, they stayed
hot languages because of experienced programmers and legacy code.
Ease of use
This seems to be very important in the choice of a new language. Is this
language going to be faster and easier to use then other
languages. This should be viewed in an historical perspective. Is COBOL easy
to use? Was it in 1960? New languages and programming paridigms
change what we consider to be easy to use.
Language Features
A language may also be chosen because it has a particular feature. You
would write in Java if you wanted to write an application that ran over the
Internet. You would not use COBOL if you wanted to write scientific programs.
Performance
In some applications performance is a big issue. This alone will keep
Fortran and C alive for a long time to come. Other applications don't need
a high performance language to get good responses on some hardware. Why do
we need to write interactive software in a very fast language?
Corporate Support
Is there a large corporation or organization that is pushing the language?
Would C have become so popular if Unix had not been written in it? Also,
the reappearance of Basic may be solely due to Microsoft's support of it.
Experienced Programmers
This is especially important on long projects. Are future programmers going
to be able to understand the code and continue development? Also, you are
more likely to program an application in a language you know well instead
of a language you will need to learn.
Legacy Code
The amount of legacy code dictates the need for programmers to understand
a language. This in itself can make a language hot. The prime example
is COBOL. Long after this language should have faded away, it was still in
heavy use. The only reason was the large amount of code written in COBOL that was still necessary to support.