Traa's Journal: Languages and Paradigms

I have now dabbled with more forms of computer lanuages and tools then I have visited countries and heard different spoken languages. And I HAVE visited quite a few countries around the world.

Bit of an awkward comparison ofcourse. Other than the word 'language', spoken and computer languages don't have that much in common.

I remember a sad day in my youth when I actually used the following sentence as an opening line to a girl: "I know 35 languages!", and when she looked at me (with what I now recognise as the 'WhatEver' look) I said "I know Dutch, English, German, French and 31 computer languages!". I soon decided that 'lonely nerd' was not my thing.

That was years ago. Now I am happily married, have a good software engineering job and enjoy a great life in California.

But I really did know a lot of programming languages. Some that come to mind: Basic, Pascal, Fortran (never saw Cobol), 68000 Assembly, C, B, Z, Prolog, Lisp, SmallTalk, SASL, ADA, Miranda, Gopher, ML, Haskel, ... In other words, University stuff.

Then came the real world and C/C++ was the only thing I dealt with for 6 years or so and all was well. Today 90% of my work is done in C++. But lately I have started spending some time on catching up on what else is available. Been dabling with some webdesign and alternative operating systems and now I can add to my list: Java, VB, Perl, PHP, SQL, HTML, C# (and soon F# although I am allready planning to call it F#&$k).

What I am really waiting for is the next major programming paradigm. I know of 4. Logical Programming (Prolog), which is evil and should be made illegal. Functional Programming (Lisp, ML, Gopher, Miranda, ...) which has its uses, although mostly in research. The old king of the hill Imperative Programming (Machine language, Assembler, C, Pascal, ...) now pretty much being pushed to the background by Object Oriented programming (C++, J++, ...). What will be the next big thing?Some form of conceptual based programming. More (better) 'visual' programming. Are we near any breakthrough that allows an actual 5th generation programming language?

Guess I'll have to catch up on some reading.

- Traa