Recently I wrote a blog on learning new programming languages and how to think about the constant changes of programming languages. Learning a new programming language is easy, but mastering it, able to use it well, is often difficult. It would be ideal if the world has only one or two programming languages. All engineers can master them and program with them effectively. Unfortunately, that's not the case.
It's necessary for us to develop new program languages every few years, I argued in the previous blog. Today I come across a related article on Javalobby, which titled "Languages Should Die".
Central to the article is the idea that programming languages are like animal species, they evolve and they die. Programming languages should die (i.e., we should avoid using them) when they become unusable. We should be prepared to abandon languages when they become less effective to program.
In reality, the problem is a bit more complex. Sometimes the industry may continue to use a programming languages because it's too costly to replace, or it's worthy of fixing. For example, COBOL is an ancient programming language. It's a language that should have died in the last century. It's still used today because certain organizations refuse to change for political and financial reasons. The Java programming is a good language, but has its imperfections. While we could create new language to replace Java, but it's probably worthy the effort to fix it.
A programming language evolution is a good thing. Every few years we should create new languages (or fix the existing languages), so that when we develop software, we can avoid inheriting "bad" and obsolete designs from the previous generation of languages. Hopefully, those improved languages will help us to build more robust and reliable software.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment