Zig Will Succeed

To understand why I say Zig will be a successful programming language, we need to know why all popular languages are that popular.

How popular programming languages get popular ? 🔗

In a talk by Richard Feldman, he talked about why isn’t functional programming the norm . And he answered the question “how did they get popular?” by this answer.

1. Killer App

   C as a systems programming language because UNIX is written in C.

   Ruby is popular because of Rails framework (a.k.a Ruby on Rails).

   PHP is popular because of WordPress and Drupal.

2. Platform Exclusivity

   Javascript is popular because it is the defacto standard exclusive for web.

   Objective-C is popular because it was the exclusive language to write apps for Apple (iPhone, iPad and Mac OS). But now, Swift is popular because Apple made it the modern standard language for their platforms.

   C# is popular because Microsoft made it the exclusive modern and easy language for Windows apps.

3. Quick Upgrade

   C++ is popular because it is a quick upgrade over C code. So, you can rename the file from something.c to something.cpp and go from here. It is a quick beneficial upgrade.

   Kotlin is popular as it is marketed as a quick upgrade for Java codebase by just converting code from Java to Kotlin or with its great Java interoperability.

   Typescript is successful popular language as it is a strict superset to Javascript. So, you can just rename the file from athing.js to athing.ts then improve from here.

4. Epic Marketing

   Java is popular and successful because sun microsystems spent too much money to market it to people.

5. Slow and Steady

   Python is popular now because it grew steadily through the years.

Other important factors for popular languages 🔗

• Syntax

  When the language use a familiar intuitive language that is easy to understand, it helps them get popular.

• Job Market

  When there is a market need for developers with the language, that language will get popular because more popular will learn it to get employed.

Why Zig will be a successful popular language ? 🔗

Zig language will be popular because it is a quick upgrade for C and C++ codebases. Zig is a drop-in replacement for other C/C++ compilers. So you can use Zig compiler to compile C/C++ code and start using Zig as you go.

It is a quick easy upgrade with huge benefits over C and C++. I see it as a successful popular language even it is not reached v1.0 yet.