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Re: SHEEP



Timothy Rue [mailto:threeseas@earthlink.net] wrote:
> 
> I don't claim to be a programming language creator, instead 3000+
> languages in less than 50 or so years should be enough to  figure 
> out that the limitations of programming languages are not going to 
> be solved by creating another one. 

I think programming languages today are better than they have
ever been, and that's precisely because there have been so many 
people trying out so many different ideas and finding out what 
works and what doesn't. And since the outlook for new languages is 
better than it's ever been, I think in 50 years there will be 
programming languages so beautiful they will make your heart break.

It took civilisation 4000 years to clue into the fact that putting
spaces between words made text more readable, and in 50 years the 
programming language community has taken the state of the art from 
something like COBOL to something like Haskell. Even joe coders like 
me have Java and Python, so it's not just the elites who have 
benefitted. I don't think the PL people have anything to apologize 
about, and a great deal to be proud of. 

--
Neel Krishnaswami
neelk@cswcasa.com