This sounds great, but is basically nonsense. The history of programming language is a heck of a lot more complicated than this pretty but wrong picture that its been an ever increasing waltz from low-level to high-level in neat chunks.
For example, there was a heck of a lot of functional programming going on in the 60s and 70s, and it all basically died off, only to resurge, a bit, today. Java was in some ways a step back, in others, a massive step forward. But in pure 'language tech', mostly a step back. The fact that java is easy to use, managed to convince hordes of programmers, and is still used today should tell us a little something about the value of mostly non-language related features such as garbage collectors. There are plenty of programming language designers of some renown, such as Josh Bloch, who consider multi-paradigm languages a bad idea. They may be right, or they may not be right, but certainly the notion that 'more features is automatically better / the future / progress' is simply not something that can be taken as self-evident. A few other minor nits: Some assemblers effectively have only 1 data type, but many don't. x86-64 has arguably at least 4 (8, 16, 32, and 64-bit words, and if you want to, you can pad this with the floating point stuff). There's already a language that effectively eliminates all mutable state (Haskell). Higher-level abstractions do not imply that this ends up being backed by 'gigabytes' of assembler code, and, in fact, language design has been moving away from 'compiling down' to the machine code level. Exhibit A: The JVM. What I'd really like to see in a new programming language is AST-based editing, a module system that 'just works' (including downloading from a DNS-esque peer-to-peer system of mirrors, and a full stack of strong crypto for signatures so I know what I'm downloading is the appropriate stuff. This would be a combination of build-time (i.e. maven) en runtime (i.e. OSGi), and far more in-depth than jigsaw), a fully pluggable compiler (i.e. where you can edit regexps in your code and the compiler will compile it down to a NFA/Thompson tree at compile time), and other stuff that mostly doesn't actually change the language any. After all, if diddling around with the language constructs itself was the silver bullet, we'd have invented it by now... a few 100 times. Have you checked how many new languages are popping up all over the place? Granted, its absolutely possible we just haven't found the right one yet, and it's also possible we have, and it just takes a while for it to gain the popularity we'd expect such a silver bullet to have, but I don't think that's going on. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
