The Programming Language Wars: Questions and Responsibilities for the Programming Language Community

Abstract

The discipline of computer science has a long and complicated history with computer programming languages. Historically, inventors have created language products for a wide variety of reasons, from attempts at making domain specific tasks easier or technical achievements, to economic, social, or political reasons. As a consequence, the modern programming language industry now has a large variety of incompatible programming languages, each of which with unique syntax, semantics, toolsets, and often their own standard libraries, lifetimes, and costs. In this paper, we suggest that the programming language wars, a term which describes the broad divergence and impact of language designs, including often pseudo-scientific claims made that they are good or bad, may be negatively impacting the world. This broad problem, which is almost completely ignored in computer science, needs to be acted upon by the community.