Programming Language Adoption

The way the development community adopts new programming languages is fascinating. I’m surprised more research hasn’t been dedicated to the subject of language adoption. If you’re a sociologist you should study this just like another sociologist studied Dungeons & Dragons groups.

Companies want the development community to embrace the languages they’ve used to build their services and products on. Startups often use newer, untested, technology to build their products. The creators want to use bleeding edge tools. But, the creators don’t know if the community will embrace their chosen languages. If the language isn’t embraced, the company will have a hard time finding people to employee to contribute to their technology.

Successful Companies Help Adoption

When a startup achieves a level of success using one of these technologies, they will put capital into the technologies they use. In doing this, those technologies have a better chance of success and thus adoption.

A technology with a big company behind it can achieve amazing things.

Google and Python

Google offer’s free online classes for learning Python. Google isn’t doing this to be nice. They offer the classes to increase the usage of Python.

Most code Google develops is in Python. If Python becomes the most popular development language, it helps Google. If more people know how to use Python, then Google’s potential candidate pool increases. It is in Google’s interest to increase Python usage. In supporting programmers to learn Python, Google is increasing the total number of developers they can potentially hire.

As a side note: The valley knows Google lives by the not invented here principle. This creates a problem with Python. Python wasn’t invented at Google, but, they use it. Although this will change soon.

Google invented their own language - Go - to overcome this problem.

Ruby, Rails, and Github

Ruby’s adoption didn’t explode until 2005 – 10 years after the release of the language – when some dude released Ruby on Rails. A surge of developers learned Ruby just to use Ruby on Rails. One technology forced the usage of another technology.

Three years later Github was founded. Github has also helped with the adoption of Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Madlep explained, on a stackoverflow answer that has since been taken down, why Ruby projects – more than any other language – are on Github.

Github captured mind share of the Ruby community quickly. Github hosts the Ruby on Rails source code. Some Github team members are active in the Ruby community and associated open source projects.

Rich Get Richer

You may be able to predict the adoption of programming languages based on which companies succeed. If successful companies utilize smaller market share technologies, expect those technologies to grow. The winners determine which languages are used.