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Over at ACM.org, Doug Meil posits that programming languages are often designed for certain tasks or workloads in mind, and in that sense most languages differ less in what they make possible, and more in terms of what they make easy:
I had the opportunity to visit the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, a few years ago. It's a terrific museum, and among the many exhibits is a wall-size graph of the evolution of programming languages. This graph is so big that anyone who has ever written "Hello World" in anything has the urge to stick their nose against the wall and search section by section to try find their favorite languages. I certainly did. The next instinct is to trace the "influenced" edges of the graph with their index finger backwards in time. Or forwards, depending on how old the languages happen to be.
[...] There is so much that can be taken for granted in computing today. Back in the early days everything was expensive and limited: storage, memory, and processing power. People had to walk uphill and against the wind, both ways, just to get to the computer lab, and then stay up all night to get computer time. One thing that was easier during that time was that the programming language namespace was greenfield, and initial ones from the 1950's and 1960's had the luxury of being named precisely for the thing they did: FORTRAN (Formula Translator), COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), ALGOL (Algorithmic Language), LISP (List Processor). Most people probably haven't heard of SNOBOL (String Oriented and Symbolic Language, 1962), but one doesn't need many guesses to determine what it was trying to do. Had object-oriented programming concepts been more fully understood during that time, it's possible we would be coding in something like "OBJOL" —an unambiguously named object-oriented language, at least by naming patterns of the era.
It's worth noting and admiring the audacity of PL/I (1964), which was aiming to be that "one good programming language." The name says it all: Programming Language 1. There should be no need for 2, 3, or 4. Though PL/I's plans of becoming the Highlander of computer programming didn't play out like the designers intended, they were still pulling on a key thread in software: why so many languages? That question was already being asked as far back as the early 1960's.
The author goes on to reason that new languages are mostly created for control and fortune, citing Microsoft's C# as an example of their answer to Java for a middleware language they could control.
Related:
Non-Programmers are Building More of the World's Software
Twist: MIT's New Programming Language for Quantum Computing
10 Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Kell on Friday July 08 2022, @01:24AM (2 children)
That's cool and all, but part of the power of technology is that it makes its utility available to those who are not god-geniuses. A tool that can only be used competently by the elite is far less valuable than a tool that can be used competently by an average person. Unless you have an army of von Neumanns available (perhaps produced by some sort of von Neumann machine?) then ultimately you must compromise if you want to be productive. It's not degenerate: it's merely pragmatic.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Friday July 08 2022, @03:26AM
And yet with tools like compilers and static analyzers and filesystems and keyboards, we still have trouble following rigorous discipline [joelonsoftware.com] when using those tools. Probably reflects more on the human condition than competency, really.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday July 10 2022, @09:24PM
Not everyone should be designing bridges and skyscrapers, no matter how easy to use you make the design tools.
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