On 1 Feb 2023 17:31:02 GMT, Stefan Ram wrote: > rbowman <bow...@montana.com> writes: >><Venting> Why does every language have to invent their own function to >>print to the console that is very similar but not the same as the rest >>of the herd?</Venting> > > Why do there have to be different languages at all?
https://homepages.cwi.nl/~steven/abc/programmers/introduction.html "Why ABC? The answer to the question 'Why a new language?' is the same as the answer to the question 'Why new computers?': because they can help you do the job better. With the choice between a language where it will take a week to write a program, and a language where it will take an afternoon, most people will choose the latter." That leads to the question of when Van Rossum was looking for a hobby project, why not extend ABC? Or Pike? https://pike.lysator.liu.se/about/history/ Then there is the question of how a new language becomes popular. When Matsumoto developed Ruby it was almost 4 years before there was any coherent English documentation. How did it get traction? How about Go? Thompson and Pike hate C++ (with cause) so they went back to C and reworked it. Then there is C++ itself, which was released before its time. There are many more obscure languages when someone saw a need. Then there are features the propagate like lambdas. Everyone came down with lambda envy and shoehorned them into the language one way or the other. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
