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As Languages Evolve...

Posted by Cliff on from the soon-we'll-have-gamut-level-languages dept.

naph writes "It seems that as programming languages have developed there has been a steady increase in the level of abstraction they use. Early languages were all very low-level, but successive generations have become higher and higher. Is this trend going to continue, or do you think we've reached a kind of happy medium between power and abstraction? Would developers prefer higher level languages, or is the direct control of things good? I was just wondering what other developers out there thought of this."

2 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. I really hope languages become more abstract by Kevin+Stevens · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As I recall from my software engineering class, programmers program at the same rate in lines of code regardless of the language (I believe IBM did the study in the 80's, but dont quote me on that). Therefore, programming languages SHOULD be more abstract to increase productivity. It also comes down to the "reinventing the wheel" factor. The more bug-free features/libraries we can stuff into a language, the more we can produce bug free code quicker. The only problem is of course that abstraction comes at the cost of speed. How much more enjoyable is it to program in java and not have to worry about cleaning up memory than say C or even assembly where everything is a battle. I dont know about you, but I would much rather type create_new_window() than worry about framebuffers and things of that nature. Hopefully this can be accomplished while keeping speed up and code bloat down

  2. Re:As long as the compiler is efficient... by Directrix1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Two words: Moore's Law. Even heavy abstraction will not keep up with the speed increases from that. And hardware is cheap. IT guys that program app servers aren't. Instead of paying an IT crew a lot of money to optimize a server you could just invest in more/better hardware. And size is not an issue any more as far as code size goes. The data most programs sift through is usually the only thing to consider as far as storage goes, since usually the data is so much larger than the program anyways.

    --
    Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF