Truth in dating (was: HELP! Must choose language!)

[Andrew McGregor]

I'm not sure when CGI was invented, but I wrote one in '92 :-)

We (University of Canterbury Physics, at the time) had been using a lot of 
Fortran (of course), C and Lisp, with a little Perl and lots of 
shellscripts for glue.  When Java arrived, the general impression was that 
it was a cute toy.  That's still basically my impression, it's mostly 
useful for UI work and areas where performance doesn't matter (there's lots 
of those, which is why Java is popular).

I'm just irritated I didn't find Python myself until '01.

Andrew

--On Sunday, January 05, 2003 13:38:26 +0000 Cameron Laird 
<claird at lairds.com> wrote:

> In article <mailman.1041399123.31276.python-list at python.org>,
> Terry Hancock  <hancock at anansispaceworks.com> wrote:
> 			.
> 			.
> 			.
>> Actually I'm sure all those languages will still be used by somebody,
>> but  relative popularity is fickle.  Just compare the current
>> marketplace with  where it was ten years ago (1993). Remember, that's
>> the year HTTP was first  deployed.  Linux was a fledgling and hardly
>> anyone had heard of Python (I  don't actually know when Python was
>> invented). Java was hardly known either.  Perl was around, but not that
>> widely used (because it was the web that made  it insanely popular).  I
>> don't think CGI had been invented, and C/C++  dominated the commercial
>> programming marketplace.  People who wanted to sound
> 			.
> 			.
> 			.
> I'll leave aside questions about the acceptance of
> C++ in commercial programming at the beginning of
> '93, and whether Perl was "widely used".
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by "deployed".  <URL:
> http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/Link.html >
> has been in *use* since late 1990.  In January 1993,
> there were over four dozen public HTTP server known.
> RFC 1945 specified HTTP 1.0 in 1996 (!), but it
> states, "HTTP has been in use ... since 1990."
>
> Guido invented Python in '90--he'd been designing
> it over the winter '89 holidays.  First public re-
> least was in 1991.  c.l.p was created in 1994.
>
> Sun formally announced Java at SunWorld '95 (May
> 23).  Usable forms of the language were in the
> lab around a year earlier (*not* in 1991, though
> you'll sometimes see that), but it was only early
> in 1995 that the name "Java" was adopted, or that
> outsiders had a chance to use it.
> --
>
> Cameron Laird <Cameron at Lairds.com>
> Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
> Personal:  http://phaseit.net/claird/home.html
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>
>