Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Programming Languages, where did we go wrong?

Back in what I call the 'Golden Age' of computing (the 1970's) the question of what programming language to use was very clear cut. You learnt the language that would take you in the career direction you wanted to take.

For scientific stuff it was Fortran, for payroll it was Cobol, to become an untouchable that was kept behind locked doors and fed raw meat. It was Assembler. Oh, and if you wanted no chance of obtaining any sort of job advancement you became a PL/1 guru.

This all made for a very orderly life.

It was even fairly orderly in the 80's, the introduction of the IBM PC, added a little more complexity, BASIC. Fortunately BASIC was never really viewed as a career making language, it was ok for Tic-Tac-Toe, and Battleship, but it really never took off as a serious business tool.


Here we are 30 years later. What the hell has happened? There are now more programming languages than there are people to program in them! I blame the Internet! You have 87 variations of C, Java, .Net, PHP, Perl, and god knows what else! In my opinion its high time the whole programming world was rationalized.

Lets go back to Fortran, Cobol and Assember hahahahahahahaha

Screw all this 'object oriented' rubbish, lets go back to the good old days where a program had a start, a middle and an end. And you could print the compile on 17 inch wide green bar fan fold paper!

It's just a thought.......

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