- #1
oldtobor
- 132
- 0
Information Technology is actually a history of regression. I started programming in Basic on Commodores and PCs in the early 80s. It was fast to learn and fast to put ideas into practice. In fact I would argue that 99 % of all IT programming problems were already well solved just using some well thought out Basic programs. Most problems IT has to deal with are really relatively simple. Then came along Turbo Pascal which was a truly great language, fast and very well designed especially to produce well structured programs. I would say that you could really feel a great improvement from Basic to Pascal. You knew things were really getting better. But good things don't last too long. Progress ended.
Progress ended when Unix and C started to become popular. Not so much Unix which has some good scripting ideas and languages such as AWK, But the worship of the C language was the beginning of REGRESSION. C was complicated, and was an abrupt departure from progress. I remember that I could quickly whip up good programs in Pascal, but in C things just seemed to start to slow down. Why did I have to allocate memory ? Why do I need the pointers ? and so on. So C started to become popular and programmers started to have to waste time understanding a lot of uselss details. Maybe client-server was wrong and mainframe architecture was better.
Fast forward the mid 90s and you get OO and JAVA and C++. Ten times more complicated, slower, a never ending list of odd questions, why collect garbage ? why do I need to download 10 Mega ? Why is everything an Object ? etc. etc. The end result today is a mass complication of things that were really solved more then 20 years ago. Maybe Javascript and PERL was the correct direction to follow, but crappy Java became the norm. There is a sociological reason for all this: we need to keep people busy at work, we need to create a never ending set of complex obscure ideas and languages probably because there really is not enough work for everyone. And companies make money by selling hype after hype.
It could be that our social system can furnish enough wealth to everyone with very little work since we have an enormous EXCESS CAPACITY in almost all sectors. But this is pure politics - sociology. Fast forward the year 2020 we will have thousands of very complex languages requiring 200 GB of disk to download. Turbo Pascal occupied 40,000 bytes and ROCKED.
Progress ended when Unix and C started to become popular. Not so much Unix which has some good scripting ideas and languages such as AWK, But the worship of the C language was the beginning of REGRESSION. C was complicated, and was an abrupt departure from progress. I remember that I could quickly whip up good programs in Pascal, but in C things just seemed to start to slow down. Why did I have to allocate memory ? Why do I need the pointers ? and so on. So C started to become popular and programmers started to have to waste time understanding a lot of uselss details. Maybe client-server was wrong and mainframe architecture was better.
Fast forward the mid 90s and you get OO and JAVA and C++. Ten times more complicated, slower, a never ending list of odd questions, why collect garbage ? why do I need to download 10 Mega ? Why is everything an Object ? etc. etc. The end result today is a mass complication of things that were really solved more then 20 years ago. Maybe Javascript and PERL was the correct direction to follow, but crappy Java became the norm. There is a sociological reason for all this: we need to keep people busy at work, we need to create a never ending set of complex obscure ideas and languages probably because there really is not enough work for everyone. And companies make money by selling hype after hype.
It could be that our social system can furnish enough wealth to everyone with very little work since we have an enormous EXCESS CAPACITY in almost all sectors. But this is pure politics - sociology. Fast forward the year 2020 we will have thousands of very complex languages requiring 200 GB of disk to download. Turbo Pascal occupied 40,000 bytes and ROCKED.