Time to Hello World and Time to Productivity
The only things that can cause a bigger arguments among computer geeks than which programming language is "better" are religion, politics, their operating system and their choice in text editor.
Everyone's got their favorites and a litany of reasons why it's the best. Most of those lists are perfectly legitimate. There all kinds of reasons why programmers are drawn to or repulsed by different languages.
And, they often seem completely baffled by the uptake of "inferior" languages like PHP. Disciples from the churches of Scheme, Smalltalk and Lisp seem most prone to this particular cognitive dissonance. After all, there are all kinds of reasons that these more popular languages are just that: more popular.
One of the reasons that often gets overlooked is a metric I like to call "Time to Hello World". It's the amount of time it takes to get all of the tools set up, the "Hello, World." program written, compiled (whatever that means for the language) and executed.
This number is entirely overhead. And, the lower that number is, the more friendly the language is to newbies and the more likely it is to gain widespread adoption.
Of course, corporate pushing can scale the adoption beyond what it would be otherwise. For instance, both Java and C# can actually have a fairly high TTHW. The number of people I've talked to who spend *days* fighting Java classpaths, etc. is staggering. But, Sun and Microsoft manage to push people over that hump.
However, for purely open source stuff, compare the number of people who pick up Javascript (with next to zero TTHW) or PHP (pretty low TTHW) vs Java. Sure, Java is popular, but it's only used by people who consider themselves "programmers". Javascript and PHP are being picked up by a much more casual crowd.
There's also a second metric that's related and determines how long someone will stick with the programming language. That's the Time to Productivity. It's the interval from "Hello, World." until an actual personal problem can be solved with the language.
Even if you have a low TTHW, if the TTP is too high, the early rush of the quick, early success dissipates if you can't actually *do* anything with it.
The thing is, that if you look at those languages that seem to succeed in spite of their shortcomings, you'll probably find low numbers in both of these factors.
