[xquery-talk] [ANN] Zorba "Leto" 3.1

[Adam Retter]

I have a somewhat different take on this. These days I think that some
languages get picked up for other reasons:

a) Relative Obscurity.
This has a certain appeal to the `hipster` crowd. From my perspective
many people around the London tech comunity have embraced Haskell and
previously before that Clojure, for the sole reason that it was
powerful but also importantly for them, not widely known or used.
Their are certainly many start-up around London now using a wide
proliferation of (older programming languages) that you wouldn't have
seen advertised for start-up jobs a few years ago. For example, I
guess not many people have heard of Frege, but I started looking at it
because I wanted a Haskell that could integrate with existing JVM
code.

b) Marketing/Packaging/App.
Actually I think Marketing has a huge influence on take-up. Perhaps we
are talking a different kind of marketing though. I mean marketing
directly to the developer mindset rather than to an organization or
middle-management. This is where there is a very pretty looking
website, which actually has relatively basic documentation and
tutorials but the packaging of the entire experience is such that you
want it to be as simple/fun as they claim.
Interestingly 2 of the 3 Scala books that I have (and maybe also the
3rd but I haven't had a chance to read that yet), have a section of
how to get Scala adopted in your work place, i.e. how to sell it to
your manager; So in that manner you have developers acting as the
marketeers of the programming language to the organisation.

c) Jumping on the wagon.
You go to a conference of a few meetups and here some talks about how
Y achieved X in 1 week by using programming language Z. You have to do
A, and you don't know Z, but suddenly it looks like an option, because
you only have 2 weeks to do this in, and well they did that in 1 week.
I guess in many ways this is just good marketing of Z, but I think
there perhaps there could be a certain herd mentality as well.


On 4 August 2015 at 09:44, Michael Kay <mike at saxonica.com> wrote:
> Various programming
>> languages had an amateurish start (this surely did not apply to
>> JSONiq), but still have become huge without anyone advertising them.
>>
>
> There are four preconditions to make a technology successful
>
> (a) it must meet a need
>
> (b) it must be understandable
>
> (c) it must be affordable
>
> (d) luck
>
> Elegance of design, in my experience, has very little to do with it; marketing has even less.
>
> Michael Kay
> Saxonica
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> talk at x-query.com
> http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk



-- 
Adam Retter

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