once you count consumers, you get into semantics. Like is C/C++ more used than javascript, because all the javascript essentially runs in browsers compiled from C++?
By that metric, all programming languages including assembly have exactly 0 consumers, since nothing human-readable actually runs on computers.
Look at that, I have saved programming from language popularity contests, no need to thank me. I will humbly accept your bitcoins though.
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The most reasonable definition of a language consumer is as follows: If a program text P is written by a human-level intelligence in source language L, then every user of any automatically-produced-artifact from P is a consumer of L.
Suppose a programmer use typescript to write a web app:
- The programmer, who must compile the typescript to javascript, is a consumer of whatever language the typescript compiler happens to be written in.
- The user, who must run the resultant javascript files, is a consumer of
(1) typescript, because the JS files is an artifact produced automatically
from the typescript text the programmer, who is a human-level
intelligence, wrote.
(2) The languages the browser/JS engine is source-written in, typically C++,
Rust, or Zig.
(3) Possibly javascript, because typescript is a strict superset of
javascript, and thus there is a probability that at least part of the
original text of the webapp is valid javascript, and thus qualify in the
definition. Take note that this has nothing to do with the typescript
program text compiling to javascript, this is solely due to the fact
that typescript is a strict superset of javascript, any language that is
not would not have this property.
From (3) we see that languages are not completely mutually exclusive : There is a language called Arithmetic ('+','*','-','/' and numbers) that has a vast userbase unparalled by any single programming language, since it's a subset of a lot of programming languages. Other consequences of this definition is that :
- Languages with no human-level-intelligence writers have 0 consumers
- Every producer is a consumer, since the only human-level intelligences currently writing code are humans, and human producers are always consumers as well since they run the artifacts produced from their own program texts.
- Auto-Generated code add to the consumers of the generating language, not the generated language. If part of a C++ app came from the output of a python script, every consumer of the app is a consumer of python, since some of the artifacts they consume ultimately came from python source. If the script generates (say) Rust or Fortran code that is then compiled and linked into the final executable, the only languages the users consume are C++ and Python. Auto-generated code is an automatically produced artifact.
Why not? Is writing a function to calculate a fibonacci number not programming? If no, why is it the introduction to a lot of functional language tutorials?
