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Take this scenario:

  • A programmer creates a language to solve some problem.

  • He then releases this language to help others solve problems like it.

  • Another programmer discovers it's actually much better for some different category of problems.

  • By virtue of this new application, the language then becomes popular for that application primarily.

Are there any instances of this actually occurring?

Put another way, does the intended purpose of a language have any bearing on how it's actually used, or whether it becomes popular? Is it even important that a language have an advertised purpose?

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    Your HTML example doesn't really seem to fit with what you are looking for, are technical documents so different than any other document? HTML's core purpose is still the same as it was in 1989, to provide easy means for documents to reference each other. IMHO HTML is the exact opposite of what you are actually looking for.
    – yannis
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 8:13
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    Considering the long list of answers; maybe the opposite question is more interesting: what (popular) language is just used for it's intended purpose?
    – Jaap
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 15:13
  • @Yannis: Good point. It's not the best example, and could really be argued either way. Edited to remove.
    – Jon Purdy
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 18:15
  • @Jaap: I thought the same!
    – leonbloy
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 20:47
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    I could be wrong in this but I'm pretty sure most languages aren't used for what their creators intended. I think the large reason for this is that outsiders don't know what it's supposed to be used for which helps them to be more open-minded about the potential a language has.
    – Kenneth
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 21:42

19 Answers 19

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119

Lisp. McCarthy originally specified Lisp in a paper to show that few simple notations are enough to build a turing complete language. He was surprised to find that Lisp could be implemented in machine code (Steve Russel did the first Lisp interpreter implementation). Lisp is widely used for AI programming.

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  • 71
    +1, Lisp was not intended to be a programming language! I don't think you can top that.
    – Kilian Foth
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 8:56
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    OTOH, one could argue that LISP was designed for use at the border between programming and math, and it remains there.
    – MSalters
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 9:43
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    I believe McCarthy used Lisp as an example in his classes and intended to write a compiler for it, but mentioned in class one day that hand-coding the eval function would implement an interpreter but of course 'no one would actually want to do that'
    – Steven A. Lowe
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 16:26
  • My Lisper friends tell me it's not used in AI so much any more, but it still has application everywhere.
    – greyfade
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 20:47
110

Java was originally intended for embedded systems programming. From Wikipedia "Java was originally designed for interactive television". But it became hugely popular for Application and Web programming.

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    Huh. Can't believe I didn't think of this one. It's arguably the canonical example...though that's not to say I won't yet be surprised.
    – Jon Purdy
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 6:28
  • Although, was Java ever actually released for embedded work (before embedded java, which came rather after its promotion for the web)?
    – Marcin
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 12:54
  • The crucial design element in the design Java was the ability to run untrusted code.
    – user1249
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 18:24
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    the story is even worse: A) it was intended for embedded systems. B)but never saw the light until it could be embedded in webpages. C) it didn't get any respect until used for 'enterprisey' web applications and D) it finally got embedded in many phone OSs; but not as a hardware controller, it's a GUI platform instead.
    – Javier
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 19:47
  • There has been a project to get it onto set-top boxes for more than 10 years now--look up OCAP or tru-2way
    – Bill K
    Commented May 31, 2011 at 5:58
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Lua was designed primarily as configuration language, and ended up finding a niche as the most popular scripting language for games (because it's small, fast, powerful, portable, easily extended and embedded, with user friendly syntax). The most popular game to use it, World of Warcraft, doesn't even really use it for configuration, using XML instead.

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  • ...and now with LuaJIT it's finding more and more use in real-time processing applications
    – Javier
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 19:50
  • 2
    Not really en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_%28programming_language%29
    – Lukasz Madon
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 21:22
  • @lukas: "Not really" what? Note that it's predecessors, SOL and DEL, didn't even have control flow, they were purely configuration languages. Lua was the extension of those configuration languages to include programming support.
    – Mud
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 22:37
  • "Lua was designed primarily as configuration language" I would say as a programming language.
    – Lukasz Madon
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 22:55
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    Perhaps I should have said "intended purpose" rather than "designed primarily as". The intended purpose was to use Lua where SOL and DEL were being used. These were configuration languages that users were starting to demand programming features in. Lua was created to fill that need. As the authors themselves have stated, "The wide adoption of Lua in games came as a surprise to us. We did not have game development as a target for Lua." That's pretty much exactly what the OP was looking for, no?
    – Mud
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 23:23
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Larry Wall's original intention for perl was for a "general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier" and the man page describes the language as:

Perl is a interpreted language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting information from those textfiles, and printing reports based on that information.

And of course the man page also tells us that Perl stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language (the actual name is a misspelling of the original name Pearl, changed when Wall discovered an already existing PEARL language).

Perl went a long way since then, as it is the language from which the gods wrought the universe.

enter image description here

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  • 23
    One should correct that: Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister
    – Richard
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 9:42
  • 3
    There is more than one way to unabbrev! Very Perly
    – user1249
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 16:44
  • Any acronym for Perl is actually a backronym.
    – CanSpice
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 19:26
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    @DarkTemplar The way I interpret it is that perl has crept it's way almost everywhere. From it's humble beginnings perl grew to be a very popular web language, an extremely popular scripting language, a somewhat popular multi purpose language, its regular expression syntax become something of a definitive, gave birth to another language (php) etc. Plus the comic also references lisp, which is the accepted answer to the question, so I thought it was a fun (albeit inaccurate) depiction of the relation of the two languages (one is the dreamy one, the other the one people actually use).
    – yannis
    Commented Nov 22, 2011 at 3:24
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    @DarkTemplar Yeap. It's in the top ten in the TIOBE index. Of course you souldn't take TIOBE index very seriously, it's quite relative and subjective. But still a good indication of language popularity.
    – yannis
    Commented Nov 22, 2011 at 8:03
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I would guess that JavaScript fits into this question as well because I don't think that Brendan Eich, back in the Netscape days, ever imagined that future versions of his LiveScript would be used to create today's so called web "applications".

JavaScript has moved from simple form validations and image rollovers to a powerful tool that's able to rival offline applications, both in terms of functionality and beauty.

Unfortunately though, I think many still see regard it as a toy.

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  • 31
    The interesting thing is that it is moving towards being the assembly language of the web. In other words, what other languages are compiled down to and executed in. I don't believe Brendan Eich expected that.
    – user1249
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 18:25
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    have something to add: It is not just a client-side scripting language. Many projects like node.js or rhino use javascript as a server-side language
    – gion_13
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 19:08
  • Just curious, but what is a "client-side scripting language" vs. "server-side language".......?
    – Dark Templar
    Commented Nov 22, 2011 at 7:46
  • @DarkTemplar. A server-side scripting language is run on the server and its output is sent to the browser. A client-side scripting language is sent to the browser as-is, and run there. (Of course, the server-side language can be used to output the client-side language, if you want.) The only language which runs in most browsers is javascript.
    – TRiG
    Commented Feb 27, 2012 at 22:31
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Erlang. It was invented a long long time ago in Ericsson labs to develop telephony applications, probably for their lines of switching and access devices. Now it has evolved into a promising general purpose dynamic language with an interesting concept of concurrency.

It would be interesting if in the future there would be more languages from the telco world crossing their lines to IT world and evolve from there, esp languages those initially designed for modeling and verification of protocols.

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  • And wasn't it one of the inspirations for node.js?
    – dodgy_coder
    Commented Apr 15, 2012 at 12:35
  • Don't think this qualifies. The reason Erlang was invented for telephony is they needed a general dynamic concurrency language. It still is that.
    – Alan Baljeu
    Commented Jun 27, 2018 at 22:57
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Pascal. Created to teach programming.

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  • 3
    Heh, that explains a lot…
    – poke
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 12:22
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    @poke: Of curse, I know.
    – Nerevar
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 12:24
  • Hehe, I see what you did there.
    – Trufa
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 13:08
  • Hey, can someone please explain this answer? Lol. I'm a noob!
    – Dark Templar
    Commented Nov 22, 2011 at 7:46
  • @Dark Templar: taoyue.com/tutorials/pascal/history.html
    – Nerevar
    Commented Nov 22, 2011 at 10:42
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PHP originally meant Personal Home Page, but today is used for a few slightly bigger web applications as well.

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  • 18
    of course, the biggest PHP user, Facebook, is in many ways still in the personal home page market.
    – Jaap
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 15:03
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    "PHP/FI was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995, initially as a simple set of Perl scripts for tracking accesses to his online resume." It's come a long way, baby.
    – nickf
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 15:30
  • Whilst PHP is still very much a Web language, it's undergone a bit of a role reversal: PHP was meant to be embedded as small snippets inside HTML, whereas many projects now generate HTML strings within PHP. They still need a <?php tag at the start of the file though!
    – Warbo
    Commented Sep 21, 2015 at 23:43
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I'm quite sure that VBScript wasn't meant for writing malware, even though that is an extremely common use for it.

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  • 1
    Thats a bit harsh don't you think. Java and C have had their fair share of malware.
    – Jeremy
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 23:07
  • @JChild: Several years have passed since your comment. Even then, however, defending VB was a very strange thing to do.
    – Magus
    Commented Mar 27, 2014 at 22:54
  • @Magus It's not even VB. It's VBScript. You know, the files with .vbs extensions. The ones that you automatically assume are viruses when you see them.
    – user16764
    Commented Mar 28, 2014 at 3:54
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Initially designed as a method of making code more generic, Template Meta Programming in C++ was found out to be turing complete, and to this day is used to greatly improve the C++ language through libraries like boost.

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    ... and to bring C++ programmers to tears with excessively long build times ;-)
    – quant_dev
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 20:38
  • 9
    and horrific error messages.
    – DeadMG
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 22:13
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BASIC is another famous case. It's name (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) hints at its origin as a learners language, but it's grown quite a bit since.

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  • 24
    heh - microsoft replaced "beginner's" with "business" and suckered in millions
    – Steven A. Lowe
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 16:27
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VHDL and Verilog (a.k.a. VerilogHDL) were originally intended to describe digital circuits and components. They were used as a form of documentation and to simulate the behavior of the components. Later, Synopsys and others developed technology that could translate (a subset of) these descriptions into a net lists of gates, which can in turn be used to produce real hardware.

VHDL and Verilog are called Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) for historical reasons. Today they are actually used as hardware design languages (same acronym).

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  • Nice, real-life model driven development
    – Jaap
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 19:05
  • @Mark Yes, VHDL is very-high-speed integrated circuit, hardware description language. Verilog is a completely different language. Verilog is sometimes also called Verilog HDL. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verilog
    – Philippe
    Commented May 31, 2011 at 10:20
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    QHDL is very similar to VHDL and is used for describing circuits for quantum computers. I can't imagine a language departing quite so far from its origins.
    – Mark Booth
    Commented May 31, 2011 at 11:21
  • @Mark Wow, that's interesting "QHDL"! Google shows a lot of noice. Do you have a reference?
    – Philippe
    Commented May 31, 2011 at 11:47
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    I found out about it at Paul Blacks excellent "Quantum Computing for Programmers" session at the ACCU 2011 conference. His slides are at accu.org/content/conf2011/…
    – Mark Booth
    Commented May 31, 2011 at 12:06
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ML started as a language for developing and scripting a theorem prover. It was the theorem prover's "meta language".

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  • Alright. It's worth noting that the reason this is a valid answer is that its primary application is now compilers and other such language tools (at least as far as I know).
    – Jon Purdy
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 7:10
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    +1, but saying that ML became "greatly popular" is a bit of a stretch
    – nikie
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 10:26
  • Perhaps, but in addition to its direct users today, it influenced just about every single typed language that came after it.
    – Ryan Culpepper
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 11:52
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C
Originally it was originally developed for use with the Unix operating system. But the Language became so popular even Dennis Ritchie was surprised.
In his famous book The C programming language. Ritchie states "it has spread far beyond its origins as the language of the UNIX operating system." and how surprised he was as it became popular language for application development.

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    Well, it was originally designed to develop systems and low-level applications in a cross-platform fashion. It remains consonant with its original goals despite its popularity, so it doesn't fit.
    – Jon Purdy
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 6:40
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    @Jon Well it kind of fits, as it outgrew it's purpose by becoming the easiest way to shoot yourself in the foot.
    – yannis
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 6:47
  • 1
    @Yannis: Haha, true. But I'm asking about languages whose primary purpose changed utterly, not those which simply grew to encompass more purposes.
    – Jon Purdy
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 6:51
  • I would add that C became popular as one of the prime languages for obfuscated code contests.
    – Peter G.
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 16:45
  • Wasn't it designed to implement the operating system?
    – Nikko
    Commented May 31, 2011 at 8:56
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C++ was originally designed as “C with classes” to facilitate object-oriented programming in C++.

Templates were then provided in a later version to enable the implementation of strongly-typed container classes. It was only noticed later that these templates actually constitute a Turing-complete compile-time programming language.

As a consequence, many applications now use C++ not as an object-oriented programming language but rather as a algorithms-driven programming language that relies heavily on compile-time polymorphism and metaprogramming.

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    But the C++ is designed to be general purpose, and is used as a general purpose language.
    – BenjaminB
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 13:55
  • @Ubiquité I don’t think C++ really was designed as a general purpose language. Or rather, it was designed to be used for different purposes (but in particular systems programming). But it was not designed to work with multiple paradigms.
    – Konrad Rudolph
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 14:00
  • Actually, the multi-paradigm nature is inherent in its design, simply by virtue of bolting OO features onto C while retaining the ability to use its more procedural features where appropriate.
    – Jon Purdy
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 18:13
  • @Jon OK, I’ll concede that. However, generic programming and template metaprogramming weren’t among these features. And nowadays C++ is one of the only (and arguably the main) language that supports these features.
    – Konrad Rudolph
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 18:46
  • Very true. Hell, support for generic programming and const are the two most important reasons I use C++.
    – Jon Purdy
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 18:49
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ADA — originally designed under DoD contract for avionics. Although still used in that application, it's also popular for example for real-time business middle-ware.

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    It was build as a general purpose language. The DoD wanted a language usable for everything, to reduce the amount of different language used.
    – BenjaminB
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 13:54
  • That's pretty hilarious. Ada was a language explicitly created with the goal of reducing the number of different languages out there. By that metric ("designed with one purpose, used for another") Ada should be voted up to the top of the list with Lisp, another anti-language language.
    – Jared Updike
    Commented Aug 18, 2011 at 18:32
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"does the intended purpose of a language have any bearing on how it's actually used, or whether it becomes popular?"

I don't think the intended purpose of a language has much bearing on its actual use and popularity: There are some great languages that were designed from the start to be innovative, flexible and versitile, but never became that widely used or popular except in very specialized vertical markets - for example Eiffel. OTOH, Basic, Pascal, C etc etc dominated the landscape for years although they were designed originally for limited, specific purposes.

IMO Marketing/financial and support considerations have always played a major role in the spread and extension of certain languages. For example: Borland comes up with TurboPascal and packages, markets and supports it. MS comes up with C# and packages, markets and supports it. As a result, these languages became popular, third party tool industries sprung up and more and more developers and enterprises jump on the bandwagon.

But for the last few years, openSource languages and tools are changing the dynamic and languages now become popular based more on 'merit' than marketing - for example Ruby, Python and Perl. But that's not because of the 'intent' of the inventors so much as the language's built in potential for extension and expedient usage.

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I don't think there is a popular language that has not been repurposed from it's original intent. Even C was originally written to make a portable OS (unix).

Any attempt to write a truly generic programming language with no specific target in mind would probably fail miserably due to a lack of restraint and focus.

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  • postscript - is ubiquitous (in almost every computer and printer), but only used for printing graphics. Although, one could argue that it was repurposed when used within pdf's.
    – 13ren
    Commented Jan 3, 2012 at 5:39
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I've heard Ruby was designed as a language to write poetry in, turned out you can write pretty beautiful code in it as well!

I’ll be straight with you. I want you to cry. To weep. To whimper sweetly. This book is a poignant guide to Ruby. That means code so beautiful that tears are shed. That means gallant tales and somber truths that have you waking up the next morning in the arms of this book.

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    Sounds... interesting. Any source?
    – Anto
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 18:28
  • The Ruby link takes you to a book that was written to teach Ruby in an artistic way. My answer is a joke in reference to that book which asserts writing Ruby is like poetry. In reality one might say that Ruby was designed to be a general purpose programming language but it inspired (some) people to look at Ruby code as poetry.
    – Tinco
    Commented May 30, 2011 at 22:09

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