9 Mar
2000
9 Mar
'00
4:37 a.m.
And for the Computer part: I remember people during
the
70's dreaming of real world computer languages, where
a computer language may evolve not only into a tool for
programming, but also able to be used as (somewhat simple)
human language. And now we have C - isn't C a bit like the
stuff we are talking about - the lowest common denominator
of programming languages at all ?
Serious, ain't we are going exactly the same way with
programming languages as with real ones ? Just instead
of centuries, it took only some dozend years to go from
Machine code (grunting sounds) to ADA (Goethes Poems)
and only less than 10 years to fall back to C ?
I think the most obvious example of this is Java, and the
comments its developers made about C++. To paraphrase,
all the hard parts of C++ were removed to get Java. Programmers
had trouble with certain C++ features, so they were removed.
Same logic as with natural language. Unfortunately, the
parts of C++ removed are very important, particularly for
large systems.
--
Dr. Mark Green mark(a)cs.ualberta.ca
Professor (780) 492-4584
Director, Research Institute for Multimedia Systems (RIMS)
Department of Computing Science (780) 492-1071 (FAX)
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2H1, Canada