C++ was the easiest way to write kinda-OO code and use C libraries. Then it became de-facto standard for gamedev and desktop app programming.

In Linux world it's still the case that if you want to write a desktop app you should write it in C/C++. Use any other language and you will struggle against the dependency management and package managers forever.

Python is the only clear example of succeeding without a platform out of these languages, and the fact that after decades still Python is less popular than PHP shows that historic accidents and having a good platform is more important than any quality of the language.

On the other hand Perl is dead so maybe it's not as bad :)

This may be because Python lends itself to bring used in integrated environments such as Jupyter.

That's not how it got its popularity. Applets died very soon (the novelty lasted like 1-2 years), and feature-phone apps were never a big thing. Unlike e.g. mobile apps that quickly overtook the desktop, feature-phone J2ME apps at the time were a peanuts business (and there were other ways, like native APIs from Palm, Blackerry, and Windows mobile edition - of yore, not their post-iPhone smartphone OS).

Java, even back in 2000, was big in the enterprise space and remained so (which is why Sun quickly emphasized that and let the applet sdk languish).

I do agree in a very general sense, but there are definitely a few good options or there for desktop software.

For example, Lazarus/FreePascal is one of the best solutions for writing GUI apps even nowadays. It's a shame that it's dead as far as market share is concerned, even if it has a community around it, is open source and still receives regular updates with pretty good platform support.

Though i guess you could say the same about any technology stack that produces executables that are for the most part statically linked and don't complicate dependency management.

Of course, Java with Swing also hasn't disappeared anywhere and is still perfectly capable of producing most desktop software as long as there is any sort of a JDK or JRE on the device. There's also JavaFX/OpenJFX which is supposed to be more modern, but I've experienced more issues with it in comparison to Swing.

I would have avoided python if I could... But I can't avoid numpy/scipy etc etc

RubyGems was the package manager that was really amazing and changed everything IMO. pip didn’t even exist until almost a decade later after that.

[+] to clarify, I was a somewhat experienced programmer, this was one of the final year projects, for distributed systems or parallel computing I believe. A simple system without doubt, but still, a system not a "hello world". Something that I wouldn't have expected to work on first try, had it been written in C.

But of course although it's the default in Java, and not provided out of the box in Python, I also wrote some web framework stuff that adds these runtime errors to Java (by using Reflection to make decisions at runtime instead) and I've seen Python code with more type safety that would tell you earlier that there's a problem. So it's ultimately not only a matter of programming language although that does definitely set the tone.

C++ was the preferred application development language on Windows.

Python is popular because of the numeric and ML ecosystem.

I'm still confused by the cycle of

- You can run Java applets in a web browser!

- Ew. Time to stop doing that.

- I've had a brilliant idea! We need a bytecode-based VM in the browser so a web page can run arbitrary code.

- I'll call it "WebAssembly".

- You can run Java applets in a web browser!

-> Yeah, so? There are all crap, slow to start, big on resource bloat, slow to draw, and don't offer much).

-> Ew. Time to stop doing that.

Then 15+ years passed, during which JS became the dominant way to build CRUD/Enterprise/form-based/and more apps, got big features (from WebRTC to an embedded DB, and from accelerated canvas and 2D graphics to MIDI). And it even hit big on the server too.

Then: - I've had a brilliant idea! We need a bytecode-based VM in the browser so a web page can run arbitrary code.

WebAssembly, is faster than Java Applets was back then, has easier ties to the DOM for UI (as opposed to being a sandbox), can be used to supplement conventionally written web apps, and is not tied to a single company.

So, quite a lot of differences due to time, and also in the characteristics of the technologies involved.

So these comparisons frankly make no sense as every such shortcoming could have been easily fixed in 20 years.

Yes, but it was even more hard to make Java applets run with any acceptable speed in 1997, which is what mattered for their deprecation. Understadingly people didn't just say "let's suffer them for 10 years until the hardware catches up to make them tolerable".

>Also, webassembly still doesn’t have proper bindings to the DOM

Yes, but still better than what applets had :-)

>So these comparisons frankly make no sense as every such shortcoming could have been easily fixed in 20 years.

It would make even less sense for people in 1997-1999 to stick with applets because "such shortcomings will be easily fixed in 20 years". People use what works now, or at least offers a serious advantage despite the shortcomings. Java applets then didn't offer much.

It’s funny because that is essentially what happened. Other than flash (which suffered essentially from the same shortcomings as applets, but at least had a productive environment to create them), there was nothing that replaced these technologies for many years to come. Canvas rendering came much later and only with much more recent browsers did it have acceptable performance. It is not accident that many people long for the old web which was strangely more interactive in some cases than what we have today.

Don’t get me wrong, java applets were shitty. But we sort of threw it all away instead of fixing it, which in hindsight seems to have been an easier road (since the JVM has always been the state of the art runtime, and JS engines had to catch up from zero). DOM integration into an object oriented language would have been much easier than what webassembly does through JS bindings, and lack of security was frankly more of a mindset back then, and the jvm could have been sandboxed just as “easily”* as js engines are.

* it is a hard thing to do, but it happened to JS engines because the money was there. Integrating the JVM with proper sandboxing would have required less money/energy.

That's the big difference.

I think that's backwards. I was there. Aside from a few e.g. banking and government applets one was forced to use and a couple of exceptions, applets never got anywhere and died fast.

Enterprise Java became what Java is all about very very soon. Java landed in 1996. Servlets/Tomcat landed in 1998.

By 2000 there was plenty of enterprise Java development - in fact that was the year MS created its own Java copy, in the form of C#/.NET after having tried to extend their version of Java for the Windows platform.

I don't know any technical details here, but from a user perspective Shockwave did turn into Flash. The Flash file extension "swf" even stands for "ShockWave Flash".

Shockwave was somewhat similar to Flash, but it was developed for the "multimedia" CD-ROM's, which meant the files was generally too big for online. Flash was much more compact which is why it won out.

Flash was originally called FutureSplash, if I recall correctly. When Macromedia bought it they rebranded it to fit their general branding theme, hence the confusion. Flash wasn't really intended to be an app platform, it started out as a vector animation format, but later they added scripting using a dialect of JavaScript called ActionScript.

Most users ended up with the Flash plugin but not the Shockwave plugin. Macromedia Director was huge in its day - my first programming job involved writing Lingo - but it died out pretty quick when the internet started taking off.

So had the renaming taken place now in stead of twenty years ago, it would be called F7lash in stead of just Flash.

From my perspective, Python became popular as the simplest and friendliest general scripting language along the lines of Perl or TCL, and the easiest for somebody familiar with other languages like C or Java to pick up.

If I wanted to do something just a bit too fiddly for a shell script, I'd reach for Python (and still do, although I've recently started using Node too).

Perl initially became popular as the best text-wrangling language for CGI scripts and the like, but (I think) was a bit too weird to be a general-purpose hit for the masses like Python. Likewise Tcl/Tk was great for whipping up quick UIs, but both parts seemed a little too weird to stand on their own.

Ruby was another strong contender; I think Python was already too well-established to be displaced by Ruby, but Ruby found its audience via Rails (which I'm guessing is better than Django).

Hmm, are you sure? I’m not saying you’re wrong, because I’m not sure myself! I heard of Django before I ever heard of Rails but that doesn’t mean much.

Wikipedia suggests they were released at around the same time -- Django started slightly earlier, Rails open sourced earlier.

ColdFusion and JSP and PHP were dominant for a long time before Rails as well.

Hopefully it will start replacing C going forward but in that space Rust is competing with Zig and Nim.

Two languages almost nobody uses. It doesn't seem likely it's actually competing with them in that case.

[1] https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/Organizations-using-Nim

I see this point come up often, but it doesn’t really line up with my own experiences. I find the explicit state control in functional languages makes it much easier to write enterprise CRUD.

Had UNIX been written in PL/I, Mesa or BLISS, those languages would be "C" today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLISS

https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/classes/cs520/spring06/bliss.pdf

Like C, isn't it? Assignments return values! Still feels weird AF to those of us who started on BASIC and Pascal.

Go got popular because it was a Google thing and everyone fanboyed hard over that.

But no one else does

On a more serious note. I decided to read Delphi documentation recently because I’m old enough to hear a lot about it, but not quite old enough to write anything in it. It had discriminated unions. It did! I can’t imagine my life without them, I write stuff exclusively in Ocaml-like languages, so the only question that I have in my mind is “how the hell we managed to go backwards?” It’s so weird.

In that way it's like a Delphi for the modern world.

Then AdWords team which had just gone through GWT => Dart rewrite, kind of rescued the project from closing down, after the key designers left.

Finally Flutter team kind of gave a new life to Dart, which made Dart only relevant in the context of Flutter.

Python was taught in many universities for its flat learning curve, then started to be used in academic research.

Even without an unrelated platform, like JS and the browser, they had something to catapult their adoption.

Python was used in academia long before it was used for teaching. “Courting” scientists was done from extremely early on in the language history (matrix-sig was founded in 1995) and the “extended” indexing added at their request (auto-tupling and slicing predate PEPs as those were introduced for and by Python 2).