"The Semicolon Wars" - Personnal comments


I think that we have arrived at a stable stage in which new languages are hardly coming out. We can see on the figure by Eric Levenez and Pascal Rigaux showing the chronology of the main programming languages that from 1995 to the date in which this article was published (2006) there are much less new languages emerging. I would guess that during the twenty or thirty years after the first programming language came out, a research period was going on. People tried to come up with the language that would solve every problem and at the same time have the best performance.

But I think that today the concern is less about finding and establishing new languages but more about developing applications. We have all the tools (hardware and programmation languages) to developp the best applications for innovation in every fields. Especially since technology keeps growing at an unbelievable rate.

Concerning the popularity of the different languages I would say, based on my small experience and knowledge, that languages can be separated depending on the application. For example, software developers will give more importance to languages such as Java or C# because today’s software are developed in these languages. It is the same about web developers using HTML, CSS and Javascript, data scientists using Python or R or embedded developers using C and C++. As the article conclude and I agree with that, often people consider their favourite language as the one they know the best. It is hard to have a critical thinking mindset about programming language because this requires a good knowledge of each one of these.

We have reached the maturity of languages. We can associate more or less each modern language to a computer science field as mentionned above. In my opinion there won’t be many new languages in the future. To leed to the need of a new language there will have to be an important reason for this. I can think of a hardware innovation. For example several companies are currently working on quantic computing. Whenever the first quantic computer will appear there will have to be a new language able to run on the hardware of this machine.

Let’s see what the future will offer us.

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