
Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister writes in favor of
new programming languages given the difficulty of upgrading existing, popular languages. 'Whenever a new programming language is announced, a certain segment of the developer population always rolls its eyes and groans that we have quite enough to choose from already,' McAllister writes. 'But once a language
reaches a certain tipping point of popularity, overhauling it to include support for new features, paradigms, and patterns is easier said than done.' PHP 6, Perl 6, Python 3, ECMAScript 4 -- 'the lesson from all of these examples is clear: Programming languages move slowly, and the more popular a language is, the slower it moves. It is far, far easier to create a new language from whole cloth than it is to convince the existing user base of a popular language to accept radical changes.'
Member since:
2005-11-13
Yeah, me too. He does a good job outlining the problem, but I can't agree with the solution he proposes. I don't know if I have a solution myself, except to say that for me personally, the biggest pain in the ass part about learning a new language is learning the APIs/framework behind it. For example, C# is not a hard language to learn, but the .NET framework is a monster.
Thus, I think we should work towards standardizing the APIs/frameworks, then there could be 3,000 different programming languages, and you could hop from one to the other with relative ease.