> I think that there's more to this than meets the eye. I wrote my > first code thirty years ago (in Fortran and Pascal). Modern languages > are a bit more structured than they used to be, but not a lot. At the > end of the day (when all's said and done), programmers are still doing > they're job by arranging variables and loops and branches in pretty > much exactly the same same as they were doing when I started out.
No we're not. In any declarative or purely functional language you'll discover that nothing is "variable", immutability is the order of the day. I'd also seriously question whether a comprehension or mapping can be considered a loop. In Haskell, Clojure, or Scala I can easily take the infinite collection of integers, double them all, subtract 7, and return the first 20 resulting values. Try doing that with a loop and you'd be waiting for a *very* long time. And then there's Prolog, which breaks every paradigm you know, plus a few more. > In > all that time, I've yet to see a "new" language that actually does > anything "new" or changes the way I do my job. > > How about an old language then? Lisp was one of the first post-assembler languages ever created, a full 12 years before Pascal and 4 years after Fortran. Unlike those dinosaurs though, it's still very much current; the most accessible version available nowadays is Clojure. Fortran is also influential in the creation of the Fortress language, though unlike Lisp/Clojure is varied so much that I can't really say Fortress is a variant of Fortran (it's closer to Scala, ML and Haskell in many ways). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_(programming_language) Or if that's a bit to "niche" for you, try something a little more recent... SQL is one of the most widely used languages in active use today, it's declarative, and offers neither variables nor loops without vendor-specific extensions. > (This sounds strangely like a conversation that I had with my teenage > kids recently. The music they listen to is identical to the music I > listened to at their age and the reason for that is (like programming) > that the technology behind it hasn't really changed in years, just > been tweaked a bit.) > How about the music they *dance* to? > There is some progress but a lot less than people think. Things like > "full screen mode" and "exit from full screen mode" (two of the two > hundred and fifty new features recently added to OSX) aren't progress. > Dart (to paraphrase Douglas Adams a bit) is another attempt to paint > the wheels a different colour to see if it will make the wagon go > faster. > > -- 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.
