Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of C-family programming languages


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. (non-admin closure) Valoem   talk   contrib  02:09, 21 April 2015 (UTC)

List of C-family programming languages

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Sheer WP:OR list of tenuous connections. The inclusion criterion here seems to be simply that of List of programming languages by type, which is just the use of  as an trivial piece of syntax. This list has thus grown to include almost any prominent language that post-dates C. This is no more than "grabbing the glory" of anything successful after it and claiming the credit as being shared with C. See also the inbound links added to it today.

This article should go. The notion of "braces make all the difference" is too trivial, and it anyway overlaps with the existing list under "curly bracket languages". Besides which, I'd place the credit for languages using that type of control structure as belonging with Algol, not C, even if the lexical symbol used wasn't yet a curly bracket.

This list is fundamentally unimportant. No-one since the 1980s has cared about the presence of syntactical curly brackets as a defining factor: it's simply assumed to be available, just as supporting ASCII or having a notion of stream-based I/O is too. There are far more relevant ways to recognise programming language families, yet this article rides roughshod over them. This article lumps class-based OO languages like C++, interface based OO like Java, dynamically-typed OO like Python and prototype-based OO like JavaScript all into one. Those are far more significant distinctions than this chimera of "C family" based on no more than curly brackets.

There might be scope for a real article on a "C family". That would need defined inclusion characteristics, backed by RS sources, and sourcing to include particular languages as being such; none of which this article has. It would need narrower criteria than merely the curly brackets. As a result I doubt that it would have many more entries than the clear C / C++ members. Andy Dingley (talk) 21:54, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions. North America1000 22:20, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. North America1000 22:20, 14 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep and add references. The criteria should be that a reliable source has described the language as part of the C family. For example, Java. Presumably references can easily be found for C++, Objective C, C#, and some of the more esoteric ones. Finding a reference to support inclusion of Perl might be more difficult. Pburka (talk) 23:04, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
 * That three-way interview is an interesting source, however what it is it saying? It's a comparison between Java and C/C++, yet it's full of statements like, "Java is a very different design from the other two languages and appears to have a very different philosophy.", "... many of the differences between C/C++ and Java...", "one of the differences between Java and C is that Java has real arrays...". Is this article describing Java's heritage from C, or is it (as I read far more of it) distancing itself from C? Andy Dingley (talk) 10:26, 15 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Comment There is also Category:C programming language family which has very similar content. Sizeofint (talk) 03:18, 15 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Comment There are two lists here. "Languages that are obviously derived from C" and "Languages claimed to be part of the 'C family'".
 * The first is trivial (C++ is obviously part of any C family, as is C0) to the point of making notability tenuous. Even then it's harder to argue for Objective-C and C# as being "More C family than merely the curly brackets". However that is not what this article is.
 * This article is taking "C successors" and scatter-gunning that across any language with any sort of prominence today that has used a curly bracket and an ALGOL-style control block structure. This is unsupported by sources, and IMHO unsupportable. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:26, 15 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Support Just another list article with an infinitely-expandable scope ("Languages implemented in C", "Languages with C in the name", "Languages developed by some of the same people who developed C", "Languages that have been used for the same purposes as C"...) Looking for possible references, http://www.gotw.ca/publications/c_family_interview.htm limits C family to C, C++ and Java; https://books.google.com/books?id=tFng_c2BkaIC&pg=PA13&lpg=PA13 adds ObjC and excludes Java. These are the only two RS I was able to find, the rest are forum links or incidental mentions. Interesting reading: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/188455/why-do-programming-languages-especially-c-use-curly-braces-and-not-square-ones
 * Keep -- Perhaps the understanding of the languages is different and the OP might view this as trivial. I went to look for the other list in the category using, CTRL+F and saw only 1 page with the word list on it.  I'd be open to changing my opinion, if someone could point me to this second list which is duplicated? --  IamM1rv (talk) 12:54, 15 April 2015 (UTC)
 * If you are talking about the link to the category I posted, there is not another duplicated list. I was pointing out that the list includes many of the languages in the category. Depending on the outcome here the category need to be cleaned up or deleted. Sizeofint (talk) 03:42, 16 April 2015 (UTC)


 * keep - its well known that C is the basis of a lot of languages, but not all. E.g. Lua isnt one of them. I think this list could be sourced if somebody (maybe the nominator) took time to do it. Christian75 (talk) 21:31, 15 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, Lua isn't part of the "C family". So why does this list include PHP as if that is? Why is P4 categorised as part of it? There's no more sourcing for including these (and others) as "C family" than there is for Lua. Andy Dingley (talk) 22:20, 15 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Comment https://books.google.com/books?id=btlM21ivisMC gives us C# and also Java depending on how you read it. GLSL is supported here https://www.opengl.org/documentation/glsl/. OpenCL C here https://www.khronos.org/registry/cl/specs/opencl-2.0-openclc.pdf. I would support keeping this if references can be found for more than a handful of languages. I agree with Andy Dingley that the scope of this list is somewhat vague. If we are talking about languages influenced by C then basically every language since the 1980s will be here. Perhaps it should be limited to languages that are explicitly derived from the a C specification Sizeofint (talk) 03:42, 16 April 2015 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.