home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
ftp.cs.arizona.edu
/
ftp.cs.arizona.edu.tar
/
ftp.cs.arizona.edu
/
icon
/
newsgrp
/
group93b.txt
/
000006_icon-group-sender _Wed Apr 21 22:11:28 1993.msg
< prev
next >
Wrap
Internet Message Format
|
1993-06-16
|
2KB
Received: from owl.CS.Arizona.EDU by cheltenham.CS.Arizona.EDU; Thu, 22 Apr 1993 09:13:25 MST
Received: by owl.cs.arizona.edu; Thu, 22 Apr 1993 09:13:25 MST
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 1993 22:11:28 MST
From: "Clint Jeffery" <cjeffery>
Message-Id: <199304220511.AA28454@chuckwalla.cs.arizona.edu>
To: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
In-Reply-To: (Alan D Corre's message of 20 Apr 93 21:22:55 GMT <1r1pjfINN3ql@uwm.edu>
Subject: runtime debugger
Status: R
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
Alan D. Corre writes on the question of why Icon isn't more popular:
It seems to me that the reason why Icon isn't a *very* popular language is
that most of the implementations are non-commercial, so it has not been
advertised as much as others. If this is true, it is ironic that the fact
that it is free makes it less, rather than more, popular.
Sure, popular languages attract commercial implementations, but that doesn't
prove anything. How did they get popular in the first place? BASIC and
Pascal became very popular because they are used in introductory programming
courses. BASIC was built-in (and "free") on many early microcomputers.
C was developed in an industry lab but became popular because UNIX and C
were made available at little or no cost to universities. People who used
it in school often later asked for it in industry projects.
So I think Icon is not more popular because it does not cater to
introductory computer science education, because its implementations are
not very fast, because it does not provide much access to system-specific
features, and also because there are plenty of other languages out there
that are already popular.