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What languages do people who make languages use? (pldb.io)
2 points by breck 6 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments



Interesting data, though I'm not convinced of the value of including Markdown, YAML, JSON, SVG, and similar document formats?


I suggest thinking about this chart more.

You might find there are _far_ more interesting insights to be mined.

For example, here are 2 very interesting stories:

- Look at Lisp! Invented so long ago and used by so many language makers. That is a very strong signal!

- Look at the progression from TeX to HTML to Markdown for sharing information. Remember, HTML was originally developed at CERN. This shows the importance of simplicity and ergonomics!

There are dozens of these _very_ impactful and meaningful insights in this chart.


True. Those observations can be interesting!

At the same time, the Ruby repo has a few TOML files in it – not related to the implementation, but nesting in vendored Rust libraries for other tooling. So is TOML is used to implement Ruby? I can see how it could be argued both ways! Nearly all git repos contain a Markdown README – is Markdown part of an implementation? I just think a threshold could reduce the noise and make those insights you mention even clearer.

In any case, I salute your work because there are very few people doing this sort of analysis and hope you take my casual observations in the spirit they're offered. Take my upvote!


Thank you!

I appreciate the kind feedback. On Reddit the average comment is so thoughtless.

It does seem like people are missing that the title of the chart is "What languages do the people who build languages use?" and explicitly not "What languages do the people who build languages use to implement their algorithms?"


No worries, I have to keep this stuff lighthearted or I'd go crazy.. :-D

But yes, you make a good point. My mind automatically paraphrased the question more as "What languages are programming languages implemented in?" but that's not really what you were saying.

To add a little extra value here, https://dbdb.io/stats is a site I quite like that is a "database of databases" and maintains stats on the languages used to implement them. C++ and Java far in the lead!


> https://dbdb.io/stats

This is great! Added it to the todo list to integrate this data.

Thank you!




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