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hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

A Fermat's Library [fermatslibrary.com] featured paper of the week chosen a month or so ago was Richard Wexelblat's 1981 paper, The Consequences of One's First Programming Language [fermatslibrary.com]. The abstract of which says:

After seeing many programs written in one language, but with the style and structure of another, I conducted an informal survey to determine whether this phenomenon was widespread and to determine how much a programmer's first programming language might be responsible.

Wexelblat's formal and informal findings suggested there was a lasting impression left by one's first programming language, suggesting that at least part of the reason for this is that one's problem solving approach could be unnecessarily constrained by their first language:

Programmers who think of code in concrete rather than abstract terms limit themselves to the style of data and control structures of their ingrained programming habits. A FORTRAN programmer who has successfully designed a payroll system may not see any value in the ability to combine numeric and alphabetic information into a single data structure. BASIC programmers often find no use at all for subroutine formal parameters and local variables.

The mind-set problem, works both ways: the PASCAL programmer who is forced to use FORTRAN or BASIC may end up writing awful programs because of the difficulty in switching from high-level to low-level constructs. APL converts seem to abhor all other languages.

In his concluding remarks he says:

Although everything presented here is anecdotal evidence from which it would be irresponsible to draw firm conclusions, I cannot help add that my concern about the future generation of programmers remains. Who knows? Perhaps the advent of automatic program generators and very high level specification languages will so change the way we talk to computers that all of this will become irrelevant.

This had me reflecting on my own experiences and wondering, with the benefit of hindsight, whether others agree with Wexelblat then, whether they would agree with him now, or now that we do have automatic program generators and very high level specification languages, has this all become irrelevant?

Original Submission