I am somewhat amazed at the list of tech from that article, it's like he has a magical knack for picking dead ends.
C was the 2nd language I learned and I'm still using it. The big surprise for me has been javascript - it's so...bad it became good or at least ubiquitous.
JavaScript is that guy you knew who didn’t have a lot of talent but has stuck at it for the last 30 years, so is now embarrassingly doing much better at his thing than you are.
C and Javascript are both worse-is-better languages, as is SQL. They have known gotchas and quirks and lots of them. But they basically work, they were good enough, and because of that they became so ubiquitous that it's impossible to replace them.
Not ... really. Those languages all became popular and got critical mass because they were the only way to access operating systems-like things. People wanted the value provided by those platforms and had to go through the language to get at them. So they buckled up, tolerated it and promptly spent decades and billions of dollars on creating wrappers, FFIs, transpilers and the like to avoid having to touch the underlying monopoly language.
People wanted browsers. JS came along for the ride. It wouldn't have been so popular if it had lived its life outside the browser
That's exactly how worse-is-better works. You're not doing it well, but you're consistently showing up in the right place and interoperate well with the things people want to use so they are forced to get to know you.
They were both THE languages of systems that became/were important. I agree that they both have the "worse-is-better" quality about them, but C is a much more appropriate language for what it's supposed to do than JavaScript is. The fact that we (mostly) haven't been able to execute anything else reasonably in the browser is the reason why it's stuck with us. C has had alternatives for a long time but stays put, because it's just better at what it does.
I was thinking the same thing. Silverlight? Silverlight??
I just ended a job with a guy who going on about how he was a Flash hotshot back in Y2K days, lamenting "Steve Jobs for killing it." Like, dude, everyone with two neurons to rub together told you it was a fundamentally terrible idea, doomed from the start. Gawd.
I also fell for a few of his picks — Angular was a rough blow — but what a list of lousy bets.
Python is weird. It's a nice language but it was heading for tech debt status along with (maybe) Ruby, then the ML guys went all-in on it and that saved it. But how often do you find new programs being written in Python outside of the ML/AI space? People got burned repeatedly in the 2000s/2010s by building giant empires on the back of dynamically typed scripting languages and they all ended up either doing rewrites into statically typed languages or (when successful enough) funding PL R&D to try and dig themselves out of it.
I use it - and I suspect a lot of other people also - as a replacement for Matlab. I am an electrical engineer and I write short scripts to calculate stuff and hook it up to simulations etc. Matlab has great toolboxes, but is pretty expensive and the language is a bit clunky. Python is just very versatile and has a huge eco-system now that would be hard to replace. A lot of system administratiors also use it for scripting.
Which is weird because Perl didn't really go anywhere, and only got better over time. I mean, at this point it's a large dose of network effect, but I'd love to learn how this transition happened in the early days of it.
Edit: I just tried to look it up and as far back as I can find data (which is early 2000s something), it seems that Python has always been more popular than Perl. TIL!
But how often do you find new programs being written in Python outside of the ML/AI space?
Python is pretty huge in most numerical spaces outside of ML/AI, basically anywhere people would have used MATLAB in the past. It is also the go to language in GIS and quite popular in civil engineering.
C was the 2nd language I learned and I'm still using it. The big surprise for me has been javascript - it's so...bad it became good or at least ubiquitous.