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The Problem Of Developing
A reader writes "ZDNet News is running an editorial about the choice of programming languages for developers today. The author suggests that developers have been left with little choice because all of the current programming languages are essentially the same."
They both are brilliant innovations by Microsoft that will carry us all into the wonderful future on the information superhighway!
The owls are not what they seem
The author obviously is not in the right industry if he thinks developers only will program in VB.NET, C# or Java. I suppose I shouldn't show up to work on monday for the job I got programming C, because once the word gets out I'm *sure* that C will only be found in a museum.
Yes but every time I try to see it your way, I get a headache.
There may be only two choices for making internet apps, but a lot of development is still going on that uses neither .Net nor J2EE, and will continue to do so for the forseeable future.
He needed to make it clear that his scope was only web-based development.
I think this article is basically ZDNet trolling again. After all, the more "controversial" the article, the more hits they get = more ad revenue.
So today's developers will use one of three languages: Java, C# or VB.Net.
Strange, a lot of projects I'm familiar with don't use any one of those languages. I think it depends who you talk to.
I think the author believes in two common fallacies:
I'm sure the argument is a lot more valid for big corporations, but they've always been bastions of VB and "4GL's" (even when 4GL was just a marketing term). Basically, /. has been trolled again.
---Windows 2000/XP stable? safe? secure? 5 lines of simple C code say otherwise!
The short editorial is good in that it points out what I suspect most developers already knew (but the marketers would never admit) -- there basically are very few choices offered in terms of "how to do it". As a matter of fact, I know in my part of the country, 95% of Internet application work being advertised is one of two things: ASP/DCOM apps, or J2EE apps (using IBM Websphere, sometimes WebLogic).
That's it. No Web job I looked at in my two months of searching for a job recently specified anything else. No Perl. No C++ unless the job also specified ASP and DCOM. Certainly no Zope, Tcl, etc.
Is this because no one uses any other technologies? No, of course not... but those other approachs lack a strong marketing organization behind them... Programming is as prone to the influence of hype as anything else.
That is what I think is important to assert; that other choices do exist, and it should be our job as supposed experts to investigate all the options. Diversity is a healthy attribute to have... Let's hope the "hyped" languages never succeed in marginalizing all other approaches.
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
Just intriguing to see. J2EE, .NET, etc., all definitely have a place, but it is interesting seeing how many people hop on the bandwagon without requiring the developing company to prove that they eat their own dogfood.
The question left for the reader is where this leaves developers. Was it a better world when developers could chose different languages based on the requirements of the application? Or should all languages do the same thing with different syntaxes? Microsoft has decided which way it prefers, and choice is out.
You still can choose different languages. Nothing says you can't use C/C++, VB 6, Perl, Python, or whatever else you want. While the implication in the article is that all developers have only two choices, the article should have said that Windows-specific developers are left with the two choices of Java or the CLR languages while other developers are still free to choose the tools that fit the problem. Nothing has changed unless you are only going to do Win32 programming.
...the programming language being used by a potential employer.
The article is overall pretty positive, but I do disagree with a few things.
I specified VB.Net as opposed to VB; even though Microsoft would have you believe otherwise, the two are really different languages.
I don't think MS is really trying to hide that VB.Net is very different, and many many VB developers are mad at it for changing things so dramatically. Although the syntax is close, there were many changes, some make necessary by the fact that everything is now an object, and some just to drop bad practices (Wend, Goto, Variant, As Any, etc.).
The article also makes it seem like MS is advocating C# completely replacing C++, which it is not. C++ is still included in Visual Studio.NET and although MS is pushing C#, it's not going away in the MS toolbox.
If you want an example of MS dropping a language, look at Visual FoxPro. Anyone remember FoxPro? MS is still officially "no comment" on the matter, I wish they would just come out and announce that it's dead.
The different languages for CLR being alike to skins is a pretty original argument. We could pick it apart, but I see where he's going with it.
Please subscribe to see the more insightful version of th
As far as I know (not far?) C++ and C are still widely used in industry. The editor speaks of C++ significance as something of the past: 5-years ago.
GUI skins are discussed as a pretty weak analogy of language interfaces to common runtime libraries. Then of course, the editors example of a GUI skin is Windows XP.
Where I work, C++ is the prime langauge. But then, we're worried about cross-platform development. Maybe that's a thing of the past, too.
Don't waste too many brain cells on this one.
XML causes global warming.
Hmm... I'm no expert, but neither, apparently, is this guy.
A) All languages share a common runtime: Assembly. Just because I can run LISP and C on the same computer/runtime doesn't mean that they're similar. CS is all about abstraction. Of course you can have the same underlying structure, you can have different underlying structures too. That's the beauty of abstraction!
B) Java and C# are not the logical successors to C/C++. They're more like a smalltalk with a C-syntax and some trade-offs for efficiency. In terms of providing system calls and API's that are cross-platform... Well, even more like smalltalk!!
C) Remember, C++ started out as a preprocessor for C. Any "C++" code just became C code that was uglier to look at. The difference between procedural and object-oriented isn't that big a deal, other than it's often easier to think in OO and easier to implement a language that's procedural.
For a more interesting observation about the same problem that comes from Rob Pike (big UNIX guy at Bell Labs, co-wrote the UNIX Programming Environment) go here: Systems Software Research Is Irrelevant. It makes many good points about how cs is more the same than different now as compare to 10, 15 even 20 years ago!
Like Python, Perl, Ada, Eiffel, VB, C#, Cobol, etc.? I don't look at them as skins
There are still millions of lines of COBOL, FORTRAN. And you can still develop in ADA, LISP, Scheme, etc. Compilers exist.
Sure - Java, Pythol, C# are pretty similar. But what about Lua? PERL? Or CURL?
Sounds like a case of the "good ol' days".
or did this guy not seem to know what the heck he was talking about. Plus he completely ignores languages like Delphi, Kylix, PERL, PHP, etc.
Or is it just that he works for ZD?
Nearly every programing lanagage is turning compatable (or turning complete). There really isn't much more to say. If you can write the program, you can in any language.
The only exception I can think of is sql, and that was never intended to be a programing language. (although i've not kept up, it might be turning complete by now with extentions I'm not aware of)
Revolutionary devolpment has stagnated, but that is good. House devolpment has pretty much done the same thing, I know people who live in houses 150 years old, and they are contrstured much the same as modern houses. Sure a 2x4 has a standard size now, while it didn't then, but that is a minor evolutionary change, not a revolution. We no better than do write languages the way cobol was written, but the only revolution since cobol is OOA, and there is OO-cobol for those who want it. (there were other evolutions that cobol missed out on, and some would argue that OOA isn't not a revolution either.
The author suggests, clearly "Microsoft has decided which way it prefers, and choice is out.", and not that developers face today a hard choice when looking for programming languages.
It's easy to see the difference here. This article only scratches the "All languages look the same", specially for coders. Maybe for deployers (if you make this separation).
He even let the essential point, for developers, by throwing questions (2) to the air.
Well, let me answer what the article should have touched. It's not the programming language that MS or Sun is controlling, but the tasks to be performed that they are limitating. By making a common programming framework, so widely marketed and, good or bad, soon to be accepted, from Microsoft or not, they are essentially narrowing the solutions that one might come for a problem, since you have to do the 'framework-way'.
Yes, it's good to have a common ground where applications, services and solutions can be distributed. But a lot of problems will arise when you can't (or perhaps should not) use the right tool for the right job.
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
Visual Studio.NET includes Visual C++, and it remains the most important of the products (I'm sure it irritates the VC team seeing the marketing droids out in force selling VB.NET and C#.NET when the C++ engine in Visual Studio.NET continues to be improved, with optimization enhancements that further extend its performance brilliance).
Usually in media the editorial process is such that the writer doesn't determine the headlines or titles for his articles -- that'll happen at the production stage, at which point the article is out of the writer's hands. I agree that it should have been made clear, though, and if I were the writer I'd be getting on the editorial staff to get on the web staff to change it, because it reflects poorly on him, when it shouldn't.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
This guy is saying that programmers only have 3 choices; Java, C# or VB. He backs this up by stating Java is what you learn in school these days.
Do not buy into his "reasoning". When I was in school, they were teaching Scheme and Lisp--make no mistake, what they teach is school is not what will build the future! The programmers who only learned what the professor told them became tech support and helpdesk. In those days, to be a 'real programmer' you had to know assembler and 'C'. They made the big bucks, and all major operating systems and applications were written in them.
Today, things haven't really changed that much. Professors are teaching goofy stuff, programmers get a degree but never learned pointers, and the major software is still written in C. The major difference is the success of C++. Yes, there are lots of Java programmers out there, but really fairly few *major* Java programs. The major OS's and applications are still written in C and C++,rather than assembly.
Of course, in the end, if you learn 'right', what language you use is simply a choice, like a carpenter might use a metal hammer for nails, and a rubber hammer for wooden pegs. The right tool for the job. Today, the jury is out on C# being the right tool for anything, and even Java is still a new fangled gadget that hasn't fully proven itself in the toolbox.
Example:
Look at some of the other languages that have been ported to the CLR. In every case, those languages have had to lose something important that made them different to fit the common dominator offered by the CLR. Microsoft has brought the notion of skins to programming indeed.
(emphasis mine)
What a gratuitous (and feeble) claim. The author obviously think that about 3 languages exists: C(and friends), Java and VB.
Some functionnal languages have been successfully ported to the CLR, and they didn't need to be amputated for that.
For example, Standard ML and Mercury. Both have been succesfully ported to the CLR without violence to those languages.
So, in conclusion, I agree that when you know only 3 procedural/OO languages you might be under the impression that all languages look alike.
Move along, nothing to see here.
cheers
What's .NET written in?
oh...
hmmmm....
GOODNIGHT EVERYBODY!!!!!!!
Eiffel.NET is not Eiffel
VB.NET is not VB
they are just C# with a different syntax.
Scheme has been particularly butchered.
--
E_NOSIG
He's primarily referring to the app server (aka web services) market. The implicit assumption is that client machines (your desktop) will do most of their work via web services. These will be implemented on .Net (soon) or J2EE (now). He's not talking about client-side app development so much.
Keep in mind that Java, for example, is very fast as a server-side language.
The real question is: is his assumption correct? Will web services take off to such an extent that the majority of new development is done in these languages?
I guess I'll have to tell my boss I can no longer do Perl scripting for him. And I suppose I'll have to stop writing the shareware game I'm working on until I have time to convert the existing Objective-C to C# - assuming that there will be a MacOS X C# runtime and IDE that I can use. And I suppose all of that C code I've written in the past will have to be junked by the people using it.
Oh, well. Another day, another stupid analyst.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
That's funny...I've been developing for many years, for a number of very large companies, and I've seen no indication of a mass exodus towards J2EE and .NET. With a large base of C/C++ legacy apps already in place, there's not a chance in hell J2EE and .NET will "rule the world" anytime soon (if at all). I've seen too many "large-scale enterprise solutions" become waterlogged by voluminous requirements birthed from the loins of the J2EE standard, or slowed to a crawl by megadollar application servers that simply can't scale worth a damn.
Sounds like this guy's just trying to make a name for himself. To me, it simply appears to be a load of FUD, with no basis in fact (like most FUD).
I'd argue that there's a lot more perl out there doing heavy duty than there is Java. Python (by way of Zope) is also gaining in popularity.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
Author seemed to not consider Scheme and Prolog. Meanwhile its not widely used, they find a niche in research community. They use different paradigm, not just a mere different syntax.
It is true that general programming language is dominated by OO-based or imperative based programming language, but things keep improving. Like Java -- it includes features on type safety to some extent. Newer programming languages are designed to ease developers for rapid development phase and overcome various limitations from their predecessors. Thus, developers in turn do have choices: Whether they want to use the newer ones or not.
Since programming languages are designed to ease users, they are specifically designed with as minimal amount of learning as possible. Hence, since virtually all programmers are familiar to C/C++ syntaxes, the design of the new programming languages tend to adopt them in the hope that the language will be quickly embraced. Thus, this explains why the newly programming languages are like C/C++ or using this paradigm.
Now OOP paradigm has "invaded" the market. Aspect Oriented Programming is yet another new concept to supplant the OOP. When better paradigm comes, it will eventually be embraced after it has been proven cost-wise and time-wise worthy. We will witness whether this is true in the near future.
Just my 2c.
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Error 500: Internal sig error
In fact, if one were to look at computer science departments across the country, you'd see that Java has replaced C++.
Yes, and don't we all remember computer science departments espousing all sorts of other languages that had no commercial following (AlgolW) or limited mainstream application (Pascal)?
Computer science courses use computer languages for a variety of purposes, such as teaching algorithms, language design and compiler writing, several of which are quite different to the requirements of engineers building substantial systems.
Yes, language B might end up supplanting language A, and if it does you might note in retrospect that computer science courses started using language B before engineers, but you can't make the deduction the other way around.
Just check out how many Java contractors are currently out of work in the UK and compare with C++ contractors.
From the article:
So today's developers will use one of three languages: Java, C# or VB.Net.
Does anyone else get the feeling this guy has never done any serious programming?
- VB.Net is completely useless for the majority of software being developed. (Personally, I think it's totally useless but I digress...)
- C# hasn't really shown me anything that Java hasn't so I don't really see how it's going to replace C/C++ in places Java hasn't.
- Java... wonderful Java... the same Java that was predicted to take over the world several years ago (much like this article is saying). Now, I personally think Java is great for many things but I also think it's unsuited for many others.
And I really don't see scripting languages (e.g. Perl, Python) going away real soon... and C isn't going ANYWHERE for quite awhile - what language do you think your OS is programmed in? How about your cell phone software? Palm software? I don't see any of these programmed in ANY of the languages the author mentions.
Oh and what about AI? Which of these is going to replace Lisp and other functional languages?
Nosce te Ipsum
Just to nitpick, I'd like to point out that describing LISP as "radically different" ignores history. LISP was one of the very first programming languages, and in fact flows with the theoretical mathematical syntaxes better than the languages that followed. Thus in fact, C is the "radicaly different" one, that revolutionized progamming by ignoring theory and math and focusing on practicality.
Perhaps this is the result of being stuck in an academic situation right now, but perhaps the idea that all languages are the same is because - get this! - they are.
When one can reduce anything to a Turing machine, there isn't anything we can't do with say BASIC that we can now do with C# or Python. It might be faster (to a degree) or more elegant, but still possible.
Perhaps we should focus on pushing the envelope computationally by demanding new models of computation that would break the Church-Turing universiality of computation. Biological or quantum computers have the means to give programmers new ideas that are completely different from what we've already seen - just look at Shor's or Grover's algorithms for quantum computers. These CANNOT be done on a regular computer.
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I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
You're not completely wrong. All the classic ingredients of OOP -- messaging syntax, encapsulation, inheritance, etc. -- can be simulated in a non-OO language by consistent use of naming conventions, function-argument-order conventions, etc. In the end, it all reduces to machine code anyway, after all.
But a true OO language makes these things
easier, by providing special syntax for message passing, enforcing encapsulation, etc. I'd rather write:
somePerson.setName("Foo")
than:
person_setName(somePerson, "Foo")
I'm a bloodsucking fiend! Look at my outfit!
Firstly, the writer has donned blinkers and cannot see outside the very limited problem of the quick construction of client-server systems based on reusable components.
Secondly, it really doesn't matter what the implementation language is. It never did. A talented programmer will use what is there. In the course of my career I have used everything from PDP11 assembler to perl by way of Cobol, Pascal, C/C++ and Java. The writer just doesn't seem to appreciate how much code holding the internet together is in languages that are rather more mature and fitter for purpose than the latest craze has a chance to be.
Color me cynical, but I suspect he's only talking about this particular thing because that's the kind of thing that gets convention-goers to bug their bosses to send them to.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Neither is new or inovative. C# is a combination of C++ & Java with a few changes here and there.
.NET, Microsoft just combined existing technologies for other areas. Take there idea to compile everything down to one to one language. It is not new. I go into this here. The only thing Borland didn't do is create a an interpreter for the common language. If they would have done that, you'd have part of the new compiler that Microsoft has in VisualStudio.Net. I should also mention that Microsoft owns a portions of Borland.
As for
The idea that Microsoft created this completely new and innovative technology is strictly a PR campaign.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
Well, one thing that is new is the .NET Framework SDK. For the first time, ALL data types and system classes are identical for .NET programmers, regardless of language.
COM+ tried to do something like this, but there were always some data type and wrapper issues with Win32, and one language or another (usually C++) came out "ahead" not in terms of programmer preference, but in terms of it couldn't technically be used for one reason or another. Well, without some major hackage anyways. For example, firing up the VB6 IDE allowed you to turn around a quick, data-enabled app more quickly than the equivalent VC++ app, though you were stuck with a kludgy language and using previously built DLLs from other languages involved a lot of work. On the other hand, if you wanted to build a system service, C++ made it easier. But if you wanted to write server-side scripting, you were back to bastardized VBScript syntax. Etc. Your question was "how does using a CLR make this any different?", and I think this is one very clear way. Of course, it comes at a small peformance price (and certain C programmers will claim some "dumbing down" or lowest-common-denominator drawbacks have been incurred).
Oh my god. Moses handing down tablets from on high? A sweeping statement supported by no figures, no examples. Why will they be dominant? Why will they supplant C/C++?
I would assume that basically all of the Unix market will remain on C/C++/fortran/cobol. Why? Because J2EE and .Net are buzzwords and Unix people have an uncanny nose for sniffing out this kind of crap. And the Unix market is big enough to ensure that your virtual-machine-of-the-month based language "controlling the programming languages market" is always going to be a dream.
And everyone will shop online, and bookstores will go out of business. I'm sorry Matt, haven't you heard of MY object orientated virtual machine based runtime enterprise kidney beans based language? It's called Bollocks# and I think you will be finding it dominating the programming language market this year.
Java is the natural place that people flee to when they can't cope with memory management and pointers. Java is a beautiful language, and the class library is exceptional. But the layers of indirection added through the JVM will always make it slower, and never a language that will replace C++. Just as C++ will never replace C (in the forseeable future), because C++ has its own levels of indirection and safety which slow it down (RTTI, virtual tables, etc). Different tools for different jobs matey, not "one language to rule them all".
Java is easier to learn. Hence you can push out more graduates from Compsci courses with it. Unfortunately, you can't apply those guys to say, kernel programming or embedded systems work because they are clueless w.r.t memory management and the guts of the machine. And when speed is paramount, what is a Java programmer going to do? Turn the hotspot flag on and hope for the best? What if it needs to be *reallly* fast, like "we want operation X under Y instructions on the CPU". You're out of luck. Wrong tool for the wrong job.
Fuck I'm sick of reading this. Another pundit just jabbering off his ideas with only a market analysis background (a poor one at that), not a technical one. I'm sure heaps of IT managers will be reading his column around the world, nodding their heads sagely.
I haven't even had a coffee yet.
Ash OS durbatulk, ash OS gimbatul, ash OS thrakatulk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul! Uzg-MS-ishi amal fauthut burgulli.
To cite just one example, the author seems never to have heard of the venerable UCSD P-SYSTEM
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Beyond that, little has changed in terms of choice. If you don't want to go with the industry standard, you can still program in Lisp, Smalltalk, SML, Ada, Objective-C, or whatever else you fancy.
Does C++.NET still support multiple inheritance?
...richie - It is a good day to code.
I think the editorial dude is right... I mean look at this!
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Perl -
C -
C++ -
Pascal-
Delphi-
Batch -
My god.... they are all the same!!!!!
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
Interpreted languages pushing aside compiled languages for high performance computing? Uh, no, that doesn't follow, and the reason is that if you need the maximum possible speed and efficiency, you don't want the over-head of an interpreter. In other words, if you can get by with using an interpreted language, it is not high-performance by nature. Only by having the luxury of more-than-adequate system performance can you afford to interpret everything.
But, on a different tack, why do we care so much about the languages we use? Why are we so stuck on "my-flavor versus your-flavor"? And more importantly, why is there always this huge push to make one language dominant over all fields? Why can't I just use the language that best expresses my ideas? (if starting a new project ;-)
"Avast! Prepare for the rodgering!" THWACK! "Arrr.. me nards.."
Just to close out the whole function language argument that came up the last time .NET and languages came up, here is a link to a paper that was in Dr. Dobbs about a functional language for the .NET platform: http://research.microsoft.com/~emeijer/Papers/Mond rianDDJ.pdf
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Because all languages can be reduced to a Turing Machine, we should all program in UTM.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I've been programming for more than a decade using Objective-C, until recently on Yellow box, and not so long ago, switched to GNUSTEP and Cocoa.
Even if the syntax is very close from C if you want it to be that way, I've never had the feeling of programming with a language that ressembles any other C based languages.
It's quite powerful, indeed, and gets your projects done in less than anything else I know of, and the environment is just beautiful too.
PPA, the girl NeXT door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
>>If this is true, then how did Java get into the >>mix after starting from scratch only five years >>ago? As you may have guessed, many people see >>things a little differently to the way
>>Microsoft does.
5 years ago? Strange...... i must have been halucinating when i was running Sun's HotJava web browser on my Sparc10 back in '94.
And before it was branded 'java' it existed as 'oak'.
Not to slag Sun since i think java is pretty sweet, but you'd think in the EIGHT damn years since it first came out they'd have sorted out some of these same platform incompatibilies that plague java developers. "Write once - debug EVERYWHERE".
Well, at least they admitted AWT was a piece of shite and moved on to Swing (which is nice, but a reasource hog).
Becuase in some cases it is just barely coming alive. If you look at the source code for most of the Open Source Projects you can see that a vast majority of them are still written in C. C++ still does not have as much of an installed base as C.
.NET technology is going to knock off a language base over night is just plain false when one considers just how many technologies are all ready implemented in that langauge and how important it is that those technologies be maintained.
.NET will be a short lived fad than the likelyhood that an established technology will just disapear in the night.
Predictions that the
It is more likely that
Given that Perl imitates Lisp and Scheme more closely with each release, that GC made it into the mainstream with Java, and that Python eventually got lexical scoping, maybe you should revisit your idea about whether what they teach in school is what will build the future.
Interesting perspective..
What I got out of the article was:
Because of CLR, most languages for a common runtime will end up having the same abilities, just different syntaxes.
So, if you know VB.Net, you'll be as 'powerful' a developer as someone who knows C#. But then your C# is probably watered down also.
I think he's saying CLR has it's advantages, BUT keep in mind you may be sacraficing a better tool for the current job.
Kinda like Java.. choose interpreted platform interoperability over compiled speed.
I saw/remember nothing about "All other languages will die.." What would I do with my REXX knowledge? :)
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Does VC.NET correct the fact that using an exception specification generates a C4290 warning (Exception specification not supported)?
If not, then I'd say that the C++ engine in VS.NET has a hell of a long way yet to go.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
The most widely deployed Turing Complete machine/language is a close race beteween Javascript and the Wintel machine code, with Java a distant 3rd. Since there is a problem with reliance on machine code for dynamic installation of software over the network, that leaves Javascript the most obvious candidate in which to write other languages. Most people never thought of Javascript as anything but an afterthought to HTML so they might have their eyes opened a bit to the power of Turing Completeness by seeing the TIBET virtual machine written in about a 100K Javascript embeded in a web site's (gzipped) HTML. It gets away with this by dynamically patching (Perl-config style) Javascript incompatibilities and building out from the set of features thereby supported cross-browser.
As I've written elsewhere, this isn't the ultimate language by any means -- but it is a critically needed repair to the foundation of the web that can be followed by more advanced VM's later on.
Seastead this.
What happened to Ada(r)?
As a former employee of a DoD contractor, I remember (with great pain) the Ada mandate.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
*Only* C# can access the whole feature set of the CLR. Other languages get close to varying degrees. So the C# developer reigns supreme in the .NET universe.
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E_NOSIG
... is being an engineer who's boss will read this article and take it as The Truth.
Nosce te Ipsum
Why the pain? Ada is great language that has matured quite allot in the last 10 years or so, especially with the update in 1995. I cant say the Ada mandate was a good thing for the langauge, but the language itself is very nice. I think the main problem that people have with it is its pascal like syntax and the fact that it imposes allot of discipline. Programmers generally dont like any discipline much less externally imposed by the language. However, that does not negate Ada's benifits as a programming enviroment and it shouldnt be dismissed out of hand.
I'm a programmer, I don't have to spell correctly; I just have to spell consistently
I suppose the key advantage of microsoft's new langauges is their accessibility. They make programming easy and allow just about everyone and their pet monkey to make interactive web-based services. The problem with the article is that it refers to the majority of programmers and not the majority of programming. I'm sure 5x as many people are employed using these langauges, but I truly believe they are doing 5x less programming from a difficulty standpoint. The difficult applications (signal processing, computer graphics and games, server and embedded systems, AI, whatever) are all developed using C, assembler, or some other more empowering language. I think we need to develop a distinction between end-user net-service based programmers and true developers. Something like the distinction between a carpenter and my sister who assembles furniture from ikea. I apologize to everyone I have offended. But all the hard stuff is still done with langauges that I respect.
It was the "Great Pain" part that killed it. I too suffered through a few classes on that language and it simply boiled down to supply vs demand. The civilian sector saw no reason to learn Ada since other languages could accomplish the same functionality. As the era of Reaganomics went away and the infinite supply of government money for hiring contractors died, the contractors were forced to cater to customers other than DOD to stay alive. Everyone else was looking for C/C++ or Java (mid 90's) and so that's where the talent and training went. The DOD finally had to accept the fact that there weren't enough Ada supporting contractors left to support the language as a standard, so they instead moved to the "Commercial Off The Shelf" COTS line of thinking. Fortunately the contracting industry had basically settled on C/C++ as the language of choice, so we didn't have the myriad of languages you did back in the 80's.
I think a few DOD offices still try to push for Ada, but most have accepted defeat. All the new systems coming online in the USMC logistics community are now written in ANSI C.
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
Autocoding project proposal
If you cannot tell the difference between a three deminsional data array or 3D computer graphic from
3 dimensional Reality, then the Matrix has you. If you are confused about the three deminsions of length,
width and height, then the matrix has you and you don't know it.
But seriously, see the code for what it is, super-impose the nine action constants upon what you do in
coding to find the control points for automating.
As an example of these nine action constants, everybody uses them all when
comming to slashdot, reading and posting comments.
It's physics!
Lets see now:
Switch (AI - alternate/activate interface) - start and stop, change
interfaces - Uh, start up Web Browser and connect. Go to slashdot,
newsarticle, thread....
Apoc (PK - Place Keeper) - keep track of where you are - Pick up where
you left off on the thread..
Tank (OI - Obtain Input - Output to-> Input) - get input - read with eyes.
Mouse (IP - InPut set) - input from - internet and monitor
Dozer (OP - OutPut set) - push output to - via keyboard/mouse to
Slashdot comment posting
Neo (SF - Sequence stufF) - one step at a time - damn this non-polyphonic
qwerty keyboard and mouse...
Morpheus (IQ - Intelligence Quotient) - what's the meaning of the post
I'm reading, what the meaning I want to respond with - within the
(KE'd) constraints of
Trinity (ID - IDentify) - identify posters and forum - hey there is one
by ____ in ____ forum, now I know to be (KE'd) constrained as to
how I respond.
Cypher (KE - Knowledge Enable)- constraints to apply to Morpheus (IQ)
meanings and Trinity (ID) poster named _____ and _____ article.
My conclusion: The author is trying to reach a broad number of readers, many who aren't familiar with .NET, the CLR, Java and how thier programming paradigms are almost virtually identical. (I've mentioned it before, .NET is a Java rip off)
.NET being the only 3 choices in the future." I guess he figured that C is going to go way of assembler as virtual machines begin to outperform C code with super optimized JIT code.
.NET are only capable of supporting the language paradigm that Java and .NET share.
.NET...
.NET's CLR. I suspect that Sun is probably working on an Interoperation method somewhere...
As far as his claim is concerned, "Java and
In light of all this, the author has concluded that any modern language will be a Java clone only varying slightly in basic expression syntax.
Futher, he seems to suggest that Java and
THIS ISN'T TRUE...
People have already implemented a number of alternative languages for the Java platform including Lisp, Python, and god knows what else.... The same for
THIS DOESN'T MEAN THERE ARE NO ISSUES
The big issue with JavaLisp, JavaPython, and JavaBasic is how to get them to interoperate. Microsoft provides the interoperation with
In conclusion: He's wrong and he's right...
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
I disagree slightly that Java was the logical evolution of C++, because it lost something that the creators of C++ tried very hard to maintain when they "upgraded" C: efficiency. Java, whatever the excuses, is not very efficient, and most developers know it. This is NOT to say C# is much better, but it does leave us wondering why Java, which had such a big head-start on MS, could not have done a better job with the architecture of Java.
Not really. If anything, Java and C# are logical steps backward, but they certainly aren't successors. Neither of them have anywhere near the level of dynamic runtime, reflexion, meta-programming, or general flexibility that Smalltalk has.
It makes many good points about how cs is more the same than different now as compare to 10, 15 even 20 years ago!
It really hasn't progressed. No language, other than things like multiple inheritance (which was tried in Smalltalk, but ditched) and sugared syntax, really has features that surpass something like Smalltalk-80, a language standardized in 1980. Even then, the research was done in the years previous to 1980. It's kind of sad, really. I watched the Alan Kay lecture tape "Doing with Images make Symbols" again last weekend, and it really illustrates this point; between the Smalltalk group at Xerox PARC, Doug Englebert, and the Flex visual programming language, we've not had any real advances, other than making things cheaper, smaller, and crappier. By crappier, I mean taking Smalltalk and Lisp, and perverting them into the hacks known as C++, C#, and Java.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
IMHO the ideal language would have the following: objects/classes, inheritance, polymorphism, private data, public data, NO MEMORY allocation or automatic like perl/Java and a good clean garbage collector (like perl), i.e this leaves out C/C++ as both require either you write a garbage collector or you do the alloc/free. Compiled to executable code, with a fast easy to use GUI IDE for graphics, cross platform capability with NO "if window do this else if mac do that etc. (Java is not compiled to native exe). Also it needs the standard for/next, switch/case, while/do, etc. Visual basic comes close but it is not cross platform compatible. Lastly it needs to be fast. What language do you know of that fits this? Oh and there is more......
Only 'flamers' flame!
Regarding A: The JVM and CLR are at a higher level of abstraction that assembler. As such, they limit the range of languages that can be implemented more than assembler. This is more true of the JVM than the CLR, but both of them include high level object-manipulation instructions that you don't get in most assemblers that make them more suitable for some kinds of languages than others. Notably, garbage collected, statically types, single dispatch, single inheritance languages like C# and Java work better than most others.
Well, until you write a different "dialect" of your language, like using Eiffel# instead of Eiffel - which is not really an improvement and not the vast world-changing development improvement that Microsoft said it would be.
I wish I could find the previous /. or k5 story that had a link to this article, but basically someone did the math and discovered that the CLR only really supports certain kinds of language characteristics, and so eventually to use the full power of it you have to use a language that is essentially C# with different tokens. C# is the "common denominator", and other languages will need a C# compatibility layer of varying complexities, depending on their similarity to the concepts that make up C#.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
The real problem with languages today are that they aren't created to solve a problem, they're created to make money. Languages used to be developed to make systems programming easier than doing it in assembler (C), or make logic programming easier for first order predicates (Prolog). VB.Net and Java are there to make money for their creators (Sun and Microsoft). They have a kitchen sink attitude with features and are targetted at applications developers with sometimes no formal training in Math or CS. They're not efficient, different or revolutionary. They're designed for what Sun and Microsoft think the IT market wants.
Leave the gun, take the cannoli -- Clemenza, The Godfather
Whether this claim has any merit or not is left as an exercise to the reader.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
What about Python?
Python is not "like" any other language- it is an amalgamation of the best features of many languages.
I program in Python because the language does not get in my way- of doing things. Later its easy to port Python apps to C, Fortran, whatever. The opposite route is pure hell.
Replacing a position because some guy back in '83 decided to use the odd-ball programming language : $120k
Maintaining 17 different operating system at once : $225k
Answering calls from 200 end users with slightly different desktops : $57k
Having your entire network, the networks of all your end users, and your entire array of backup systems turned into incomprehensible mush overnight due to an advanced virus that could easily target and replicate in your undiversified computer systems : Priceless
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Oh, I agree. Ada95 is much better than Ada83.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I largely agree with you about Smalltalk. I often rant in a similar veign myself. I just want to present some things that have given Java (at least) something of an advantage:
1. Memory usage. I know its somewhat spurious, but things like VisualWorks could get really huge. Squeak is better, and of course computers have largely caught up, but Java's one-application-per-process approach and dynamic class loading has arguably been more practical than the Smalltalk wopping great image file approach.
2. Dynamic compilation. OK, it was invented for Self, which is arguably even neater than Smalltalk, but its finally found widespread use with Hotspot.
3. Static typing. I'm unconvinced myelf, but a lot of people are very suspicious of dynamically typed languages, probably because they're confusing dynamically typed with weakly typed. However, it does help with static analysis - although of course 99% of Java environments don't do this.
Where is it?
You know, real programmers code their apps in Fortran 95. Well, I suppose real programmers program in 66, or FORTRAN IV or something, but I'm young and I don't take to Hollerith. Fortran!
Fortran programmer...oh yeah. Array math for life!
There are huge numbers of major Java projects. You just haven't seem them because they are used internally by large corporations in "invisible" roles. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I happen to have lots of evidence of presence.
You could explain to anyone with a modicum of intelligence how C's pointers differ from object references in Java in about 10 minutes. Anyone with a CS degree will know about the memory model of computers well enough to understand.
I don't know what planet you live on, but on mine "top coding jobs" rarely hire people on the basis on knowledge of awkward features of aging programming languages.
I don't know what language we're going to be using 25 years from now, but it's going to be called FORTRAN.
(sorry, someone had to say it.)
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Is that they really don't improve programmer efficiency over the languages made yesterday.
Java is not much better then C, C# and Java are very much the same. VB, well VB doesn't make it easier to program. All these languages suffer from the same problems.
It's still very easy too.
Write unmaintainable code.
Write APIs that make no sence.
Write insecure code.
Write code that nobody else can use.
And too hard to write code that is..
backwards compatable
self-documenting
easy to read
self organizing
Without good programmers it doesn't matter which language you are using, as all of them suffer from the same faults. Where are the totaly visual languages, LabView anyone? Not as good as it could be, but it's a start.
Why are all new languages text-based? None use color (does color fourth count?). Python uses whitespace as a way to imply function (a good thing). With 17" COLOR monitors being the minimum that a new or year old computer has as it's display you would think that us developers could devise a language that allows us to express to ourselves as well as it expresses to the computer.
You can write unmanaged C++ and target the CLR, in the sense that the compiler will generated CIL, and a CLR-compliant execution environment will be able to run it. What you cannot do is have the CLR understand your C++ classes and objects as classes and objects, because the CTS object systems only supports single implementation inheritance, uses a garbage collector and so on. To shoehorn C++ classes into the CTS object model you have to use managed C++ (which is really gross lookinng).
In order to interoperate with other CLR languages you need to comply with the CLS as well. This limits the use of various things. I think it is at this level that you lose templates.
Someone who doesn't know much about the deep technical levels of programming has been writing this article or he is attempting to aim the article at a non-technical audience.
.NET initiative. The rest moves toward Java. In the company I work we have productions on both platforms. We don't have the focus on the name of the language anymore. For us its much more important to make the correct architectural design of the system as a whole, and this require skills in IT architecture (especially OOA). In that sense I agree with the article, when it says the choice of language is not the key issue.
First many will note the lack of many common programming languages. As an example, have I seen quite huge programs made in Perl.
In my experience (by now I know more than 15 programming languages and shift between them depending on assignment or task) I have only found two major categories of programming languages. Sequential (C, Perl etc...) and Object orientated (Java, C++ etc...). When you know 2-3 languages in each of these categories it becomes more a question about knowing the syntax and knowledge of the language supporting procedures (or libraries if you prefer).
Today the OO languages become more and more commonly accepted as best practice. I believe that's why Microsoft goes the OO way with their
Some of the solutions I have been involved in I have found some algorithms to be more effective to optimise when using a sequential language. Especially when you have to work on long arrays of data or the amount of objects that interfere with each other increase dramatically. (I have seen this in some chemistry and physical models.) It is therefore not easy to conclude anything in general, but choices have to be made case-by-case.
Other things to consider are the computer on a hardware level. A CPU typically runs programs sequential order. Those working with assembler know this. (Of cause some may be working with parallel computing and multi processors, but that's an entire story of its own...)
-:) Oh no - not again.
www.rednebula.com
Unfotunately these adds aren't written by rocket scientists. Someone in HR writes up an add and runs it by a manager in IT. The manager says, Java's good, SQL is good, .Net is good (manager doesn't really know what it is but it's on the cover of Infoweek), and probably should have some Windows, Solaris, Unix, VB. So, the final add comes out "Java, SQL, Oracle, VB.Net, .Net, Windows, Solaris, Unix, VB". What they actually needed was a guy to install Windows, install Office, write some VBA, and handle their exchange server.
Leave the gun, take the cannoli -- Clemenza, The Godfather
Good analysis. I find writing in Java to be a very pleasant experience. But when I'm searching for a utility on Freshmeat, the Java programs don't get even a glance. I'll always prefer programs that are faster and smaller to those that are slow and bloated.
Hell, I am tired of arguing over what language to use to do simple applications, and most applications are pretty simple. Don't believe me? Then consider the poliferation of applications that are written in VB.
I take the "if it feels good do it" approach to programming. If you like the language and feel productive with it, then, hell, use it.
I like writting apps that do things, not learning new languages or arguing what language it better.
The author has over simplified multiple things in his article. Every simplification has enabled him to claim things that on the surface seem reasonable but in practice are false. To further increase the noise he has a lot of his 'facts' and 'assumptions' incorrect.
1) "J2EE and .Net--will essentially control the programming languages market"
How does he define the programming languages market? There are more people employed writing "vertical applications". Their choice of language and libraries is typically dictated by legacy: fortran, cobol, lisp, C, pascal, etc. What about embedded systems: assembly language, C, C++, Forth. High performance computing using vectors and parallel algorithms have a whole set of specialized languages.
2) "Still, it is an amazing achievement to be able to support different languages on the same runtime, right? I certainly think it is, but others would disagree."
Where has this guy been? By the early 1980s there were compilers for Pascal, C and Fortran that compiled to P-code (a common runtime) and were either compiled to native machine code or ran in an interpreter. Not a new concept. It is just that people are ready to accept the cost today.
3) discussion of what is the natural descendant of C++.
Who really cares? Once you've chosen a language to write in, it doesn't matter how it came to be. It supports a set of programming constructs and has a number of libraries available for use (that may support the type of program you are writing). The evolution of the language is completely irrelevant.
Language designers are very aware of other languages (more so than Liotta) and will borrow/steal ideas and syntax that they like. The language is designed with a particular purpose in mind. There are literally hundreds of domain specific languages that work better than C#, Java, VB for their intended task. They may be similar to another language, or use similar constructs but they are not the same.
4) "With .Net, there is only a single runtime (functionality), but different language syntaxes (look and feel) can make use of it."
There has always been a single runtime, the machine code. It hasn't prevented languages from having different semantics from one another. .Net and JVM won't prevent it either. The syntax of a language is almost accidental from the point of view of the language designer.
I could keep going but I'm also over simplifying so I'll stop.
- AndrewN
My sole exception to this is a language called K. Yes, it has its roots in APL and has added to the APL model from languages such as Lisp and Scheme, but it has some very interesting new features of its own.
K is very very very fast to write and the run. It blazes in both categories. There is a full relational database that is written in K, called KDB. It crushed Oracle on the TPC-B and TPC-D benchmarks in both speed and storage size, requiring only a few percent above the dataset size in overhead. It has native clustering and replication that allowed it to run on a 50 cpu Linux cluster loaded with 2.5 billion stock trades and quotes and have simple table scans (such as, select max price from trade) take under a second and multi-dimensional aggregations (such as, 100 first desc select sum size*price by sym from trade) take only 10 seconds. Starting the database cluster took a tenth of a second. It is SQL92 compliant, has an extended ultra-powerful query language called KSQL that makes writing queries very simple, and the stored procedure languages are K and C.
In bwk's language benchmarks, even though this is not the K strong point, the sum of the execution times were: K at 32 seconds, Perl at 95, Java at 300, and TCL above 1400. The lines of code to implement were: K at 9 lines, awk at 95, Perl at 96, TCL at 105, Scheme at 170, VB at 200, and Java at 350.
Yes, K can look like line noise, but unlike Perl, you get alot from this. First you get extreme code density and see the entire problem on the screen at once. I came from a Scheme background and Perl hurt my eyes, so I was very skeptical, but after my roommate persuaded me to look at K harder, I realized that this high code density made it very easy debug and write code. It is rumored that KDB is written in 26 files of code, each file consisting of a single screen of code, labeled a to z. Try doing that in any other language. The language is exceptionally regular. It is so logical and consistent that it takes a little getting used to. You never have to remember any baroque language rules. Anything that makes sense, you can do. Also, even though it looks difficult, it is extremely easy to learn because K is directly translatable to English, in fact there is a K program that will do this automatically. For example to split a line by tabs you could write: And this is read: It may take a little getting used to, but with a month of K, my roommate and I were able to converse this way when describing K and you could see the picture developing in your head. It was amazing.
A unique feature of K is what is called the K tree. Unification is a very strong idea in K, so it unifies the idea of object, variables, attributes, namespaces, and dictionaries. A dictionary is a native K type. Each variable lives in a dictionary (somwhat like Python). These dictionaries are joined hierarchically and can be removed and added dynamically. All variables are on the K tree, too, so a new namespace is really just a dictionary on the K tree! This means that you can rearrange the K tree and change what functions get called. This is the most reflective language that I have ever seen (Python, Scheme, and CLisp come in a very close behind). All variables have attributes. All attributes are is a special dictionary attached to the variables (the language is so regular that this is really a namespace with a blank name so to refer to the attributes of a variable you say ns.var..attrib). And, of course, each attribute is just a variable so each of those can have attributes, too.
This interesting K tree leads to a very elegant GUI. Each variable can have an attribute named c (for class), and this can have certain values like `table, `check, `radio, `button, and others (the backtick ` is how you make a symbol). Lets take radio for an example. Then you would have another attribute o (for option) with possible values: These four lines would create a radio box with five choices, zero through four, and everytime you evaluated r whatever the radio was set to, r would evaluate to. Basically, each variable has a direct on-screen representation (they default to `data) and is directly manipulable.
K also has the ideas of dependencies and triggers in the language, so if a..d:"1+b" then refering to a will dynamically calculate 1+b, but only when necessary (if you refer to a multiple times but b does not change between those references, a will only be calculated once and stored; K figures out the dependency graph for you). There are also triggers. If b..t:"a:b-1" then whenever b is assigned or modified then a will get the appropriate value. This trigger can be anything, such as a network operation or a gui command.
The language has some other unique features like an interesting callback oriented interprocess communication system and an on-the-fly optimizing vm.
Of course since it inherits some background from APL it has bulk operators, called adverbs, that modify functions in every conceivable way (much more powerful than APL or Perl). One of the signs of a good K programmer is one who knows how to do this and doesn't use any loops (KDB, the relational database, is written without any loops).
From functional languages K inherits higher-level functions and projections. Both which are very standard practices especially when combined with the bulk operators. b f[a;;c;]'d takes the four argument function f, fixes the first and third arguments projecting a function of two arguments, then applies it to each down the list of argument in b and d.
When you use K you truly are standing on the shoulders of giants. The person who wrote it, Arthur Whitney, has this amazing ability to identify the important pieces of a problem and simplify away the rest. The performance in K and KDB is incredibly; the simplicity and power of the language and the database is incredibly.
K runs on various flavors of Unix and NT, so people should take an open mind (I didn't have one at first and was very skeptical) and really try the language and try a new style of programming. Your code and thoughts on developing will never be the same.
-j
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Live languages change, ideally the best parts stay and the worst parts are deprecated.
Old languages stick around, and occasional releases are defecated. You can support crap as long as you don't play with it, and if you put crap in a seive don't expect to be left with the best parts.
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
Ada is almost dead in the military. Why? Because there isn't enough money in maintaining Ada programs. They work, first time. Great for the military, lousy for the military-industrialist complex. Spend twice as much making it in the first place, then get no lucrative bugfix money afterwards. Making expensive programs that actually work is commercial suicide. Making cheap programs that actually work (which you do after some experience) gives you only subsistance level profits. Making cheap programs that almost work and require lots of profitable maintainance for years is the road to riches. So what if a few ships need towing to port due to a divide-by-zero error?
Of course, where firms could get sued if they screw up, such as in commercial avionics and jet engines, Ada is universally used. Ada doesn't guarantee good, safe, maintainable programs, but it's relatively easy to make them in Ada, and darn near impossible to make them in C.
As for Ada being harder to learn than C, which is harder :
for(i=0;i<BUFFER_SIZE;i++){read(i);
}
or
for i in buffer loop
read(i);
end loop;
Maybe if people just quietly gave facts and hard numbers in the Great Language Wars then the Truth Will Out.... Nah. But it's worth a shot, anyway.
Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist
I think this describes about 90% of the problems in the "IT Industry." It doesn't get any better after someone gets hired either.
"VB.Net is completely useless for the majority of software being developed"
The majority of *programmers* are VB programmers according to the last 4 years of programmer surveys by Giga and Gartner. COBOL is 2nd, C++ is 3rd. Java is trailing in 4th.
VB creates the most software out there: those hidden custom applications that you never see that run the backoffices of your banks, utilities, and insurance companies. It's changing, there's a lot more Java out there than before, and a lot more web based stuff, but this is just reality once you move beyond the ISV world.
The author of this article is looking at the aggregate software community which is primarily made up of business developers.... C programmers aren't the majority of these.
-Stu
Python, Haskell, Clean, Mozart-Oz, Mercury, etc... all the same? Only to the blind. Open your eyes, open your mind.
Most "real" hackers, coders, developers, computer scientists, etc... love programming for programming's sake. I suggest that if you are one of these "real" types, you spend a weekend programming in Mercury, another programming in Haskell, another in Python. Each time think up a project that could be done in around 16 hours of time, and code it using a certain paradigm: functional, procedural, object-oriented, declarative, etc... Trust me, it will open your eyes to the many different ways to accomplish the same thing. For certain tasks some things are better than others.
Actually, writing an EverQuest client (first revision) is something Java could do quite nicely. The demos Java3d I saw at QuakeCon (and what you'll be able to see at GDC) are pretty convincing.
Everquest's client was really that complicated, and Java3d is more then capable of rendering those types of scenes.
Less Talk, More Beer.
Won't anyone stop and possibly think: maybe this isn't a ZDNet-FUD story, or a clueless journalist, but maybe a practitioner with a point?
.NET have little relevance here, whereas C and C++ maintain their positions as the "true" languages.
.NET -- lots of training gigs, but very few consulting pilots yet.
.NET national trainer. I don't think I'm alone in looking at these figures. Let me be very clear: The greatness of open source development is that none of this really matters. If you love a language, use it. The marketshare of a language really has no effect on whether you can use it to write good software, it really only speaks of the probability of getting a job or contract using a particular programming language and working as a custom software developer.
.NET in that equation. The author's prediction of a 50/50 .NET/J2EE split is silly. More realistically, by late 2003, mid-2004 I would suggest:
.NET.
.NET may grow to overtake the other languages, but I wouldn't bet on it until 2004 at best, no matter what the hype. It's a conservative industry, and not even Java, the current adoption rate record holder, was adopted as fast as some think .NET will be.
.NET catches on, there is a problem that the JVM or the CLR does not have a design that allows for true language innovation. We're stuck at extracting and sharing "design patterns" to patch all the shitholes we find in our languages instead of inventing new langauges to fix these problems.
.NET. They won't point you to the absolutely horrendous performance problems of porting languages to .NET if they don't walk & talk like C#. This is where the "skinnable language" concept comes from... the CLR shipped with Windows is optimized for statically typed object oriented imperative ALGOL-like languages, C# and VB.NET in particular. You're not going to run Lisp, ML, Haskell, Self, Smalltalk on them with reasonable performance without a) bastardizing the language and b) using the .NET base class libraries & foregoing the libraries that ship with your language (a major hinderence for Common Lisp and Smalltalk, I'd say).
.NET is sealing us into another 5 years of the status quo.
There seems to be a tremendously insular mindset here on Slashdot... Java and
The majority of software developers and software development work gets performed today in large corporations in industries like financial, insurance, manufacturing, utilties, pharmaceuticals, defense, real estate, retail, etc. 90% of this work is effectively about writing something that talks to a database somewhere for operational or decision support (reporting) purposes.
The culture of these companies is tremendously insular with regards to technological change. Here's a quick'n'dirty view of what tools are used generally out there, all IMHO:
up until 1998:
C++ (MFC, COM, UNIX), pick a 4GL (VB, Powerbuilder, Delphi), some Perl, tinkerings with Java, some niche technologies (WebObjects, Smalltalk, Lisp), and mainframe legacy (COBOL, fortran, etc.)
past 1998:
more Java, C++/COM going well, C++ UNIX going legacy, VB holding steady, Perl growing, other 4GLs going legacy, niche technologies being replaced with prior mentioned technologies, mainframe legacy being retrofitted for Y2K
2002:
Lots of Java, steady amounts of Perl & PHP, VB is legacy, C++ is legacy (COM and UNIX), some niche technologies remain but are targetted to be 'sunsetted', mainframe legacy systems in place but some are looking to be replaced with Java systems. Growing interest in
ANSI-C doesn't really enter into the picture. The #1 one criteria for choosing a technology in these businesses (usually) is how easy/quick can it talk to a relational database. Java's past performance problems are largely irrelevant today -- this language is running billions of dollars of transactions a day through thousands of companies. It works, and it's fast enough for most purposes.
You may not agree with this picture, but it has been my experience as a senior consultant to many different companies throughout the world, and working for a company that is a Microsoft
Remember: my assumption is that the custom software marketplace is very conservative in the technologies it chooses because of the maintainance costs involved. So you see less diversity in using niche technologies unless a group with complex needs (i.e. an OODBMS in Smalltalk, or an expert system in LISP) shells out the extra $$ to get it done. Most systems just aren't written that way. If I'm wrong on this, if Goldman Sachs or Johnson & Johnson or Royal Dutch/Shell are really building most of their next projects spread over hundreds, if not thousands of developers -- all with ANSI-C, then I sit corrected.
The author of this article is making an important point, though he didn't qualify it properly enough... language diversity is drying up in the custom software development market..
This year, if you look at "growth", i.e. what languages are being used for new projects, there are only three major players: Java (mainly JSP/Servlet based), VB, and Perl (for backoffice automation), with other scripting languages like PHP and Python and Ruby in Japan doing smaller projects.
In 2003, there will be more
50% J2EE
30% VB, C++, Perl, Python, etc.
20%
Eventually
The problem that Java introduced, and one that will be compounded is that if
Sure, many people in this forum will point to implementations of ML, Haskell, LISP and Smalltalk on
I have a great interest in programming language innovations.... life isn't getting any simpler, and our programming languages are going to have to start looking more like Ruby, Python, Smalltalk or eventually even Lisp if we're going to be handling the burgeoning complexity that's out there. I get frustrated when BigCo's set the agenda with their marketing pushes and the industry sits still for yet another 5 years... until the next hype wave rolls through. We're going to have more failed projects, more long hours, and more stressed-out/cynical developers because language design isn't keeping pace with the rising complexity of problems we're trying to solve.
While Java did a lot to bring some innovations like garbage collection to the mainstream in 1996... we should me moving beyond this... unfortunately and
disclaimer: my opinions, not my employer's. take with grain of salt.
-Stu
Perhaps I should've said that better- what do any of the mainstream languages that Smalltalk doesn't? CL + CLOS is an incredible system, full of all sorts of interesting, useful, and just plain neat features. Smalltalk is the language in which I do most of my work, be it scripting or ecology research, but CL is my second most used language.
:)
:)
But there's other ways of programming [besides OOP], whatever marketting hype might tell you.
In Smalltalk, everything is an object. However, this doesn't mean you have to program using OOP. I've written functional and procedural programs in Smalltalk, usually small scripts.
Macros are one of the things that Lisp really has over Smalltalk. Indeed, Lisp is a meta-language.
Complex argument-lists not supported
In Smalltalk, if you needed this functionality, you can work around it. It won't be as bootiful as in CL, but it's better than nothing. I assume you're speaking of using an arglist like (a b &rest). In Smalltalk, that could be something akin to the message header "do: a to: b with: anArray", of course, naming your keywords something that makes more sense than #do:to:with:.
Method dispatch determined statically at runtime (a killer for dynamic languages)
This has never been a problem with Smalltalk, since the begining. Cf. Object>>#doesNotUnderstand:, which allow you to do any sort of whacky message proxing or method dispatch at runtime.
(yes, I know you mean the CLR, not sure which ones you mean to apply to Smalltalk)
Good to see a couple kindred spirits on here, compared to the monotony of C/C++/Perl/PHP/Java sheep that hate parens or are confused by object-verb syntax.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Well, I program in Lisp and so I do. They're all simple procedural languages with a simple stack semantics with maybe a bit of object wrapping.
Like the Red 'Lectroid from Buckaroo Bonzai said, "Big deal".
That is all.
As reported here on slashdot
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Ok so Eiffel.net can do Multiple Inheritance?
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Which is, of course, a very flawed argument. All serious programming languages have the same capabilities, also known as "turing completeness." This doesn't make them the same languages, though. I'd agree that there's not much difference between different object-oriented/imperative languages (e.g. C#, Java, VB.NET, Delphi, ...) any more, but there are still lots of languages that are different.
E.g. take a look at Mercury, a logic programming language (somewhat similar to Prolog, at least in syntax, I haven't used it yet). It's probably not very similar to an object-oriented language, but still it's available for .NET.
Saying that all programming languages will become the same because they compile to .NET is about as logical as saying that they'll become the same because they all compile to machine language.
There may be valid arguments against .NET, but this is just FUD.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
The author obviously is not right about a lot of things...
S'funny, I coulda sworn all my friends who work in the embedded and/or instrument control markets couldn't even write most of their stuff using either J2EE or a .NET-hosted language. And there is orders of magnitude more development done there than for all the desktop and Internet-based apps put together. (Shock news, everyone: most applications would gain precisely 0% benefit from being Internet-enabled, distributed, turned into Web Services, or otherwise buzzworded up.) C (and sometimes C++) still reign supreme here.
I know a few PhD or professional research level scientists whose work is computationally intensive, too. Many of them still use Fortran, because the mathematical abilities it provides are still hard to beat.
Oh, and aren't something like 7/10 of the most-hit websites actually running on C++ back-ends, not any of the "distributed-friendly, Internet-friendly, no-buzzwords-here-honest-guv" languages?
And yet none of these new languages can do some of the simplest things available to a C or C++ programmer, and the simplicity and fast prototyping that were VB's strongest points have been all-but-destroyed by VB.NET exposing everything to everyone.
As for Java replacing C++ in academia, that is largely because most people teaching C++ at college/university level don't have a clue, and are readily embarrassed by their students asking awkward (but really quite simple) questions in lectures. Java makes it harder for the lecturers to make an ass of themselves within five minutes of the start of the course, and the reason for switching is as simple as that. Their teaching of Java often sucks, too, but it's not quite so obvious. (BTW, I do have an academic CS qualification, and I have had a lot of benefit from the course. The popular programming language tuition -- Java, C++, etc. -- was abysmal across the board, though.)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
ahh, but isnt C# simply a Microsoft Branded Skinning of Java? even more so than j++ ?
Java is easier to learn. Hence you can push out more graduates from Compsci courses with it. Unfortunately, you can't apply those guys to say, kernel programming or embedded systems work because they are clueless w.r.t memory management and the guts of the machine.
But you know what, school is a place to learn!
When I got my CS degree, Java wasn't around, and C++ was just starting to be taught... often with the concept that OO would make it easier to learn. And you know what? The C and C++ I learned in school did very little to prepare me for how the languages were really used in industry.
Even if a student had the best, most industry oriented schooling available, I doubt they could go immediately into kernel programming or embedded systems work and be productive the first day... And a lot of schools will acknowledge that fact.
Schools are there to give you a solid understanding of how languages work, how to build the basic underpinnings of software, not the detailed knowledge of how software is applied in industry. Especially since that changes for every domain that is out there. As long as they know one language, it becomes simpler to pick up another, and to learn the nuances of that new language.
This has been discussed heavily on the K mailing list. Somebody has done a done a K-ish version of Ackermann's function that works very well. The way you program in K is different from the way you program in C. In K you choose to operate over bulk data and you slive object arrays length-wise, i.e. if you have an object of three fields x, y, and z, you would operator over all the x's, then all the y's, then all the z's.
His perspective is too narrow, clearly. Neither Sun nor MS have claimed that their operating systems will be rewritten in Java or .Net. These languages / platforms are designed to give custom app developers a better toolbox, but they aren't designed for all programming tasks.
Even at Sun and MS, they'll take the extra time and effort to write in C/C++ if the breadth of deployment can support the extra hassle and cost. This choice will remain available to all other developers as well, along with quite a few other languages for other purposes (Perl for unix admin work, Fortran for number crunching, and so on.)
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Inexperienced programmers care, because they have ego space associated with a language.
Experienced programmers care, because they know diversity brings health.
I've heard a similar argument made several times recently: learning a language is easy, learning the API is hard. I'm sorry, but that's just rubbish.
Learning to use a language well does not take 1-2 hours, it takes months. It's not just the keywords, it's the particular idioms, the underlying paradigms. If you choose to use a framework like .NET or J2EE where all languages are equal (even if some are more equal than others) then obviously the learning curve is dramatically reduced, but that's because all you've really changed is the syntax. The semantics of these languages are all much the same, which was kinda the point.
On the other hand, I have never bothered to learn any APIs in all their 10,000-call detail. Most programmers use only a tiny fraction of such an API with any regularity, and will learn that along the way through frequent use. The skill with APIs isn't knowing all the details, it's knowing what it can do, and where to look to find those details if you happen to need them.
Look at a couple of typical examples. If I'm programming C++, do I learn every detail of every interface in the standard library? No, of course not. I learn what algorithms, iterators and containers are, and how they fit together in the library. I learn what sorts of algorithms and such are available. Then I just keep a good reference book on the shelf, and look things up as needed.
If I'm programming MFC for a Windows app, do I learn all the intricate little details about each class? Again, of course not. I learn roughly how the classes fit together -- windows, command targets and controls, the document-view architecture, and so on -- and then I keep a good book on the shelf.
Basically, the flaw in the language vs. API learning argument is that while you have to have a fairly deep understanding of how to use a programming language to get good results, you don't need to learn whole APIs, just a sound overview and where to find out more.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I think the main problem that people have with it is its pascal like syntax
Again, agreed. I'd really love to shoot the guy who put the keyword " is " into the Ada language!
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.