Is it possible that we have exhausted the number of programming languages?
Have we found every kind and type?
Could any new language simply be a manipulation of programming languages we already know? More of a dialect than a new language?
Robert Martin does.
Watch his Posterous video and let me know what you think.
I’m curious to know what the 8BIT community thinks of this theory.
David Alan Hjelle says
There is perhaps a grain of truth here. Without being a programming language history expert, I find it very interesting that a 50 year old (or so) language like LISP has useful features that have only recently come to be exploited by common programming languages (think functional-style programming in Javascript). I expect this to continue to be the case: we’ll often find “new” features that turn out to be simply old ones.
Additionally, it is true that the core functionality of every language is the same. We’re all turning ideas into a series of bits to be executed. If all we need is Turing-completeness, then, well, sure.
But there is a huge difference between the machine language to draw a picture of a horse to a screen, a Javascript canvas implementation of the same, and super-duper future system where I type “draw a horse” and it infers from context whether I want a stallion, Mr. Ed, or a cartoon.
Eric Dye says
Good points, for sure!
Great example, by the way.