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)
- I removed OCaml exactly for the reason you mentioned -- readers will find that one immediately via ML, so I think it should be left out of the box, like Common Lisp. Talking of removal, I'll now remove Modula, which only gets half as many hits as the ones you mention and because its predecessor Pascal is much more important historically as well as in terms of user community incl education. Generally, most of the other 'boxed' languages in use today give millions of hits (even SAS, a quite 'lowly' one, gives ~1.5M, while LOGO gives ~11M, and ML as well as C# gives ~3M).
I must admit I still think Eiffel, Haskell and IDL should be removed based on their 'insignificance' historically and/or 'user base wise' compared to most of the other languages. And IDL describes a type/family of languages, doesn't it? BTW, I did delete the template from the articles of the languages I removed (or did I forget some?) ;-) --Wernher 23:18, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)
- I removed OCaml exactly for the reason you mentioned -- readers will find that one immediately via ML, so I think it should be left out of the box, like Common Lisp. Talking of removal, I'll now remove Modula, which only gets half as many hits as the ones you mention and because its predecessor Pascal is much more important historically as well as in terms of user community incl education. Generally, most of the other 'boxed' languages in use today give millions of hits (even SAS, a quite 'lowly' one, gives ~1.5M, while LOGO gives ~11M, and ML as well as C# gives ~3M).