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How about Perl, Ruby and C?

pg said that for a language to become popular, it has to be the scripting language of something popular. That's the category where the three languages I mentioned are falling.

So the answer is simple: one has to build something really nice in Nimrod and use Nimrod as the extension language of that thing. Maybe the embedded world would be a nice field from Nimrod due to having nice interop with C? (I haven't used Nimrod in my life yet, although I am tempted because it looks very easy).



Perl is a (3) as it was the scripting language on *Nix, and CGI was pretty crucial in the early web.

Ruby I guess is a (3): Rails is a killer app.

C, well, it's the a major accomplishment of human civilization and has held up for half a century. I'd call that idiosyncratic.


I feel like Lua is used pretty broadly for UI scripting in the games ecosystem (addons, plugins, etc) but I don't see it used really anywhere else aside from maybe IRC chatbots. Being the scripting language for something popular is maybe a necessary but probably not sufficient condition.


C had AT&T and was UNIX system programming language.

As UNIX spread into the industry, so did C.

All languages required by OS vendors as the official ones to target their OS, succeed in the market if the OS succeeds.


True, Objective-C comes into mind.




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