>>>Previously there hasn't been a single successful language, that has been proprietary.<<<
I have been thinking about this lately, and saying it too. I hadn't thought of any until I saw your note, and then RPG, the most successful minicomputer language of the 70's, popped into my mind. I don't know how I forgot it, I used to use it.
Later, Wang and others partially adopted it, but it was developed and driven by IBM. Actually, they still use it, I think.
As a language it sucks in many ways, but it had a couple of things going for it:
1) Fixed point BCD for business calcs (I think.)
2) A screen painter that was truly easy to use, that did a good job of generating back and code and database accesses for you, which you could then modify. RPG III had relational access including record locking, in 1979.
So, this is not the kind of success that SQL, COBOL, and C have had, but it is success. You could say the same of PAL, Borland Pascal, proprietary assemblers, etc - limited spread into the market but profitable on the proprietary platform.
So I think we should modify our claim to read: No popular, lasting, multiplatform language has stayed proprietary. And of course if Sun needs anything here it's popular, lasting, multiplatform.
Examples of that approach: SQL, Basic, FORTRAN, COBOL, C, C++, HTML/SGML.
Cheers,
Chaz |
