“Every language was created for a specific purpose”

Question

I was reading the post Why Language is Important (Why I prefer C#) from \'Dot Net Thoughts\' and the first paragraph of the article ends with this statement:

Answer 1

Well the most obvious one is COBOL: Common Business Oriented Language And you can see it by reading the sourcecode, too. Python had mainly multi Paradigms and clear simplicity in mind (however one can always argue about that I'd agree).

Answer 2

R language

For statistical computing.

Answer 3

I don't think that this is a useful statement. There are general purpose languages, and some languages that initially served a specific purpose have since grown to being rather general (e.g. Perl). Some languages are also perceived as being special purpose, even though they were general from the start (Lisp).

That article also shows a really narrow view of the programming language landscape.

Answer 4

Just my opinions:

C# - Microsoft wanted their own Java

Haskell - research of pure functional languages

Perl - text manipulation

Python - readable scripting language

Procedural languages - easy to compile for Von Neumann style architectures

LISP & Functional languages - help with bottom-up software design

Ruby - OO-Perl

Lua - Embeddable scripting language

C - Portable assembler

C++ - Portable assembler with objects

Emacs Lisp - Scheme or CL didn't have enough performance at that time

Pascal - Teaching programming. For some perverted reason people insisted using it for production software too.

Assembly languages - Writing machine language and resolving JMP addresses manually on paper is tedious. (I've tried it)

Power shell - replace BAT scripting

PHP - for making internets

Javascript - for making internets 2.0

APL - to make obfuscated coding contests obsolete

Answer 5

Python: A programming language that is easy to read and use.

APL: A language that is extremely good at solving mathematical problems.

J and K: Both are trying to make APL usable to people with qwerty keyboards.

Java: Made as a better C++, with focus on using a single codebase.

C++: Made as a better C with Object-Orientation.

(Qt: Whilst it is not a programming language, it does extend C++ that it's worth mentioning. Qt is a GUI toolkit, a database abstracter and many, many more things. It's also cross-platform.)

C: A better B (Seriously)

Objective-C: Apple trying to make a better C with Object-Orientation.

Perl: A language build to process text, but is now a widely used "scripting" language. It also builds on the idea of "there should be more than one way to do it."

Haskell: Experiment to make a completely pure functional language, with big emphasis on the functionality.

Lisp: Originally named List Processor. Today it's a language that pioneered many of the techniques that modern languages has. Lisp is a standard and not an actual language. Sometimes called "the programmable programming language".

Common Lisp: A common implementation of Lisp. It has many features that modern languages got, but also many features that modern languages haven't got.

Scheme: Designed to be the most pure language in existence. It's mostly used as research.

JavaScript: A scripting language based on some stuff that might be Java. Apart from the name, it has nothing to do with Java. It's used nearly exclusively as the scripting language of the web. JavaScript is based on the standard ECMAScript.

Lua: A scripting language with the goal of being a good scripting language. Useless for virtually everything else.

XML: Designed to be a way to make uniform data formats, primarily for exchange of data between platforms. Highly extendible, for example XHTML (web page) can embed SVG (Vector graphics) and MathML (Guess what) documents, giving XHTML near infinite possibilities.

CSS: Designed to style HTML and XHTML documents.

Esoteric Programming Languages: Languages designed to be confusing and hard to use.

Now, I can't really name any other languages, I hope it was useful :)

Answer 6

• Perl, because developers should learn to appreciate pain
• C++, because 5 people on the planet should be able to create Operational Systems and embedded systems and because D was too far into the alphabet
• C, because B needed a successor
• D, because C needed a "real" successor
• Python, because writing angle brackets are bad to your health
• Java, because C++ was too difficult and Gosling thought (falsely) that we needed a language without Multiple Inheritance
• VB, because Bill Gates' children needed "VB inheritance"
• C#, because Java started stealing market shares from "Visual C++"

But I guess that list might be controversial for some ... ;)