History of this box
Initially, this box was placed on C programming language and some other articles by User: Lee1026. It seems like a useful addition, so I converted it to a template and proceeded to add it to the bottom of all articles it lists. It is certainly somewhat biased in what languages it includes — but feel free to edit, as long as it remains relatively small. Deco 21:01, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Language inclusion criteria
[The article] is certainly somewhat biased in what languages it includes — but feel free to edit, as long as it remains relatively small. --Deco, above
- Thanks for the invitation -- but beware; someone might take it up :) On a more serious note, I personally would bring the inclusion of e.g. Haskell into question. What criteria should we use? In any case, I think we'd better restrict the number of languages in this particular "in crowd" to the ones with a very significant number of users all around the world. Now, how to determine Nusers ... --Wernher 21:43, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)
- Oops, forgot: also include historically very significant languages, I guess. --Wernher 21:48, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)
- My criterion was just that I'd heard of it (I'm only unsure about SAS). Originally, Lee1026 included the following text above the box: "The following are major programming languages used by at least several thousand programmers worldwide". This seems rather difficult to verify. I'd say any language given a significant treatment in a textbook on programming languages is probably good (like Pascal, ML, Lisp, FORTRAN, Prolog, C, C++ have.) All "mainstream" languages qualify, and we more or less know what those are (mainly, Java, C, C++, VB, maybe Delphi). We could even factor in Wikipedia page visit counts. I think it will ultimately come down to a case-by-case treatment. The most important thing, though, is that it remains exclusive enough so that it is small enough to be useful and avoid clutter. Deco 21:57, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)
- Your criteria above corresponds very much with my own, so there's two wikipedians -- couple of thousand other opinionated prog lang interested geeks soon to pitch in with their say :) I have done some preliminary(?) trimming already, removing some very ___domain-specific languages and some with that characteristic as well as being tied to specific companies. --Wernher 22:20, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)
- Okay, looks good to me, just make sure that the box is kept only on pages of those languages in the box. I don't agree, though, with the exclusion of Eiffell, Haskell, or especially OCaml; they're all general-purpose languages used quite widely (admittedly, OCaml is a dialect of ML, but this isn't quite as obvious as the fact that Common Lisp is a dialect of Lisp). All four give 300K+ Google hits together with the word "language", and in my own experience they're popular in a number of significant circles in schools and industry. IDL is also used widely in industry, even if it isn't general-purpose. I added these four back. Deco 22:35, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)