Over the years we have seen (well, I have :) a number of languages come and go. Some were more accepted, some a little less. So I was wondering, what do you think are factors which most impact whether the language survives ? And whether it will have a future for a number of years (by that I mean several decades or so) ?
For example, fortran and C have survived the test of time. They were popular though, but they also had very good corporate backing, financing, and standard specifications (ANSI and ISO).
Some of the modern languages I see today, although they are popular, have none of that (the current implementation is often considered standard). That is all fine for the time being, but what about 10 or 20 years later, when their authors are maybe not here anymore. I very rarely see open source languages which make the transition into corporate financing.
If you could put with a few words, in your opinion, what would be the most important factors for the survival of a language and why ?
I think the answer depends a lot on the time-frame in which you define survival. This is important because I think there are three factors that have changed over time, and are still changing:
I think the reason C has survived is because, until just the past few years, there was still a very real need for maximum performance in a lot of applications. Perhaps there will always be that kind of need, but I think it has been growing much less relevant in the past few years. I think it's always going to be around, but I'd be surprised if it was widely used 20 years from now; it's already started getting passed up in favor of C#/Java/etc in the past five years.
The recent (by which I mean past five years or so) rise of languages like Python are also a response to the fact that software has grown more complex, while performance has become less of an issue. Because consumers value the 'now', there's a huge incentive to develop quickly, and worry about speed later, if at all. That has a pretty big impact on which language you use for development.
I see clarity, maintainability and ease of use as the most important factor for survival, if you take the future out to 20+ years.