Languages Have Become Too Easy...

Apache Conference 2007: Part One

Port 25 — Thu, 03 May 2007 00:15:35 GMT

So here I am, Amsterdam May 2nd 2007. At the Apache Conference. (A Microsoft person at an Apache Conference, what is this world coming to??) I am going to blog from the Conference until it is over...

re: Languages Have Become Too Easy...

hjanssen — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 00:30:16 GMT

It is slightly before my time, but I recall when you dropped your program on the floor you would be in deep trouble :)

re: Languages Have Become Too Easy...

davidmeyer — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 23:26:49 GMT

You know, I'm not a programmer / developer, but when you talk about programming languages being difficult, it reminds me of the time when one of my old engineering friends told me how is ex-girlfriend got even with him by removing five cards and replacing them out of order when he was working on punch-card systems. In listening to him, life is simple compared to those days :)

re: Languages Have Become Too Easy...

yodi — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 21:28:18 GMT

I agree completely about the isoloation that the current high-level languages enforce from the operating systems they are deployed to. I am also a member of the old-school club where long ago my development and deployment environments required that I be Systems Administrator, Database Administrator, Systems Engineer and Application Developer. Wearing all hats required that I know how to fine tune the O/S kernel, design database schemas for optimal performance, and develop applications which could scale for the hardward enviornment. Of course at the time, before software specialization surfaced, this was the way to develop software. Knowing the operating system strengths and weakness allowed me to develop software to a quality aspect which I struggle to achive now.

I currently develop software using what I consider to be yet another new language, Java (I still remember what C and Cobol are). Although I enjoy the Java language, I still have reservations about the byte-code deployment to different virtual machine runtime environments. With the machine specific instructions in the JVM, just how do I know that the code that I have written is being run the way I intended?

So the new languages seems to be protecting us from ourselves and apparently our inability to grasp the deployment hardware architecture. And it seems that every effort is being made in each new language to allow individuals to start programming in a matter of days. For those of us that have been doing this for decades now, we know the effort to engineer software takes much more than just learning a new language.

re: Languages Have Become Too Easy...

hjanssen — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 20:19:18 GMT

I agree at a certain level. The programmer is usually at fault if something goes wrong. They should have checked it all. I am from the old school myself, so that was certainly true when I started coding, but we did not have that many higher level languages (Ruby etc). Heck you were not allowed to code unless you had a deep understanding of the operating system you where running on.

Nowadays some computer languages are advertised as ‘easy to program in’ ‘You do not have to be a wizard to code’. Or my personal favorite book series ‘learn <insert language here> in 24 hours’ . None of these go very deeply in the pitfalls of writing in the language or preparing/teaching the people on what goes on on the systems their creations will run on.

If you want computers languages easier to use for the masses than you do need to do some of the things I stated above. Expecting every programmer (casual or hardcode) to know the in’s and out’s of the systems their creations run on will be an impossible task.

As to it not being a technical problem, I think today it is. And if we do not want it to be we will need to make it easier for the programmers to use these higher level languages.

The point of my blog was not to state that the languages are to easy and therefore need to be made more complicated, but rather that the operating systems they run on have not kept pace. And the languages themselves could do more to prevent security or other mistakes.

re: Languages Have Become Too Easy...

CDarklock — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 09:15:18 GMT

This isn't a technical problem. PHP has exactly the right idea about the language itself: it's a tiny little thing that glues together a whole bunch of libraries. The problem is almost certainly not with PHP, because there simply aren't enough moving parts. Just like with C, where any problem is almost certainly not in the language itself, but in the libraries shipped by your compiler vendor. And in the vast majority of cases, the problem really exists with the programmer.

But programmers are not subject to criticism. Coders aren't bad, code is bad. And when you can't blame the coder, you have to blame the language in which the code has been written.

re: Languages Have Become Too Easy...

davidmeyer — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 20:37:34 GMT

This is truly a great posting Hank, and it sounds a lot like we talked about...needing to focus on what is existing and make it great, rather than creating a whole bunch of new things.

If you think about it, C and C++ have been around for a while...actually, a long while. So PHP has some holes. That doesn't mean it should die out, but rather, let's fix it now and make it better.

Great posting!!