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The Hundred-Year Language

Posted by michael on from the probably-C dept.

dtolton writes "Paul Graham has a new article called "The Hundred-Year Language" posted. The article is about the programming languages of the future and what form they may take. He makes some interesting predictions about the rate of change we might expect in programming languages over the next 100 years. He also makes some persuasive points about the possible design and construction of those languages. The article is definitely worth a read for those interested in programming languages."

1 of 725 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I wouldn't read too far into this article... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    no, you don't remeber your hist very well at all.

    using round numbers, he is talking about the fifties, although really he probably wants to include the sixties.

    So what did we have? Among others: Fortran, which is still around and has influenced many designs. Algol, which begat c, java, c++, c#. Lisp, which introduced FP and most (certainly not all) of the interesting ideas that somewhat mainstream languages like python, ruby, perl are starting to pick up on 30+ years later.

    I know you weren't paying attention, but OO came in the 60's, and was developed *far* beyond anything seen today in mainstream production languages by the early 80's. (smalltalk, New Flavours, CLOS)

    Most of what mainstream programmers think of as the history of language ideas is complete drek, because they make the mistake of thinking that the first time they see a company hyping an idea has any relationship to when the idea was arrived at.

    If you had actually read the quoted sentenc fo comprehension, you would understand that he didn't say that Java would be dead, he said that it was an evolutionary dead end.

    Not the same thing. Java is a fairly direct evolutionary descendant of Algol. Cobol, a contemporary of Algol, has no evolutionary descendants.

    What he said is that the languages of 100 years from now will not *descend* from Java, any more than the languages of today descend from Cobol. I wouldn't be surprised if there were Java programs around in 100 years, but that is the nature of legacy systems, not an interesting insight.