> 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_at_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
Received on Thu Mar 09 2000 - 12:37:47 GMT