How and why are languages formed / Are there any developing languages showing promise?

Question

Question 1: How exactly do modern computer language come into being and why? How do they get their start and who is behind them?

Question 2: If any, what languages currently in their infancy are showing promise?

Answer 1

Answer 2: Fortran 2008 looks very promising.

Come on, bring on the downvotes you humourless Java-teenies, Pythonettes, Rubes and Haskellites !

Answer 2

1) Most development environments these days are built to abstract a lot of low-level/inner workings of an platform to speed up development and cater for new user-interfaces and plaform technologies. There are a both open-source projects and corporates behind these changes... For instance an example would be jQuery is a newish Library that just wraps a lot of javascript making things easier and cross-platform...

Answer 3

Bjarne Stroustrup wrote a book on the history of C++, called "The Design and Evolution of C++".

Answer 4

1. The genesis of a programming language is always a different story. I'm currently reading "Masterming of programming", which is a series of interview with authors of popular languages. They explain what problems they tackled and how the language was born -- a really cool book.

2. The TIOBE index can give somehow a trend amongst the programming languages, including the emerging ones. I bet that the future lies in language that will run on top of the JVM or CLR (Notably due to the effort invested in the VMs which are now really great). Concurrency seems to be one of the hot problem of today; so I guess we will see some interesting moves in this area (e.g. Clojure).

Answer 5

How exactly do modern computer language come into being and why? How do they get their start and who is behind them?

It's a multistage process:

1. Pointy-headed type theorists and other professionals are continually proposing new language features. You can read about them in places like the Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL), which has been held annually since 1973.

2. Many of these proposals are actually implemented in some research language; some research languages I personally find promising include Coq and Agda. Haskell is a former research language that made it big. A research language that gets 10 users is often considered a success by its designers. Many research languages never get that far.

   From research to deployment I know of two models:

3. Model A: A talented amateur comes along and synthesizes a whole bunch of existing features, maybe including some new ideas, into a new language. The amateur has talent, charisma, and maybe a killer app. Thus C, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Tcl are born.

4. Model P: A talented professional make career sacrifices in order to build and promulgate a new language. The professional has talent, a deep knowledge of the field, and maybe a killer app. Thus Haskell, Lua, ML, Pascal, Scala, and Scheme are born.

My definition of a professional is someone who is paid to know about programming languages, to pass on that knowledge, and to develop new knowledge in programming languages. Unfortunately this is not the same as designing and implementing new languages, and it is not the same as making implementations that many people can use. This is why most successful programming languages are designed and built by amateurs, not professionals.

There have been quite a few interesting research languages that have had hundreds or even thousands of users but yet never quite made it big. Of these one of my favorites is probably Icon. I have argued elsewhere that nobody really knows why languages become popular.

Summary: Languages come into being because people want to make programming better, and they have new ideas. Languages get their start when somebody takes a whole bunch of ideas, some new and some proven, and synthesizes them into a coherent whole. It's a big job. The person behind a new language might be a programming-language professional, but historically, most languages that become widely used seem to have been created by talented amateurs.