In my early days of computing at school, long before the dawn of Windows, most machines (Apple 2's, BBC Micros, Commodoore PETs, etc.) booted up directly into a BASIC interpreter prompt. This meant that you never ever had to interact with the computers operating system which was entirely hidden from view. Then I went to Uni and was introduced to the world of multiuser computer systems and compilers (namely VAX VMS and Pascal). Soon after PC's running MS-DOS and later Windows started landing on our desktops and the rest is history. The only thing is that I'm wondering if we didn't miss a trick here. For nearly twenty years we've been interacting with an Operating System (i.e. Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.) and a hierarchical directory filesystem and the question I'm asking is why?
I suspect that the reason is a legacy hangover. Devices like the Palm Pilot reverted back to the old model of hiding the working of the O/S from public inspection and this trend continues with the likes of iPhone OS, Android and Google Chrome OS. I guess that's one of the reasons why Microsoft are chasing clouds so much at the moment.
Showing posts with label Programming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Programming. Show all posts
Thursday, March 11, 2010
The programming language of tomorrow
One programming language I never used was IBM's PL/1, which stands for Programming Language One. IBM billed this langauge as the only computer language you would ever need to learn. Obviously that never materialised but today's question is why PL/1 or another language has never become dominant?
For the record BASIC was my first programming language and all in all it wasn't a bad introduction. It had all the fundamentals that we still work with today (variables, constants, subroutines, expressions, loops, arrays, inputs, outputs, etc.). Then at Uni I learned Pascal followed by COBOL in the workplace. Since then there have been a plethora of 4GL's and GUI based IDE's and scripting languages have come and gone. The list almost seems endless with the only constant being native SQL.
I want to get back to my computing roots and learn a 3GL like language to start developing software as a hobby, but the choice of languages is bewildering. For example off the top of my head there's C, C++, VB .Net, Java, C#, Javascript, Perl, Python, PHP, iPhone SDK, Android SDK, etc. The list goes on. I suspect that just as the server and database business has rationalised over the last few years we are due for some pruning of computer languages. So long as they are archived for posterity - I'm hoping so anyway.
For the record BASIC was my first programming language and all in all it wasn't a bad introduction. It had all the fundamentals that we still work with today (variables, constants, subroutines, expressions, loops, arrays, inputs, outputs, etc.). Then at Uni I learned Pascal followed by COBOL in the workplace. Since then there have been a plethora of 4GL's and GUI based IDE's and scripting languages have come and gone. The list almost seems endless with the only constant being native SQL.
I want to get back to my computing roots and learn a 3GL like language to start developing software as a hobby, but the choice of languages is bewildering. For example off the top of my head there's C, C++, VB .Net, Java, C#, Javascript, Perl, Python, PHP, iPhone SDK, Android SDK, etc. The list goes on. I suspect that just as the server and database business has rationalised over the last few years we are due for some pruning of computer languages. So long as they are archived for posterity - I'm hoping so anyway.
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