Andersson's Law

Proebsting's law states compiler advances double computing power every 18 year --- a pretty depressing fact.

Another depressing fact is that the most used language appeared to the public in 1973 -- almost 40 years ago.

The second most used language is essentially a combination of language features developed in the 70th and 80th -- 30 to 40 years ago. This language appeared in 1995 -- 16 years ago.

The third most used language is 30 years old and is based on a 40 years old language with some added features developed 40 years ago.

And the list goes on... Here is a compilation of the ages of the top 10 most used programming languages:

1. 38 (C)
2. 16 (Java)
3. 28 (C++)
4. 16 (PHP)
5. 16 (JavaScript)
6. 20 (Python)
7. 10 (C#)
8. 24 (Perl)
9. 37 (SQL)
10. 16 (Ruby)

Of course, just because a language is old doesn't mean it bad. Not at all. On the contrary, an old language is proven to be good (in some regard).

What bothers me though, is the "new" languages, e.g., Java, C#, or Ruby, which don't really add any kind of innovation except new syntax and more libraries to learn. Come on, there are tonnes of more interesting problems to solve... There is still no way of automatically parallelize a sequential program for instance.

There seems to be a new law lurking in programming language development... I call it Andersson's Law: Modulo syntax, innovation in new programming languages approaches zero.

And here's the "proof":
Every year there are new programming languages, however, a wast majority of those are merely reiterations of features found in previous languages (except syntax). Thus, the number of unique features per new language approaches zero for each year, that is, innovation approaches zero.