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Programming Languages and The Tower of Babel

Programming languages are the eternal subject of debate among IT folks anywhere in the world! The Tower of Babel gives us a good perspective!This passage talks to people's efforts to build the Tower of Babel to reach heaven. God did not want to have them do it so easily. So he gives them many languages so that they cannot understand one another!

You can rest easy that the following has nothing to do with religion. Bear with me and I'll explain after the quote:




But the Tower of Babel has always served well in Computer Science to illustrate the never ending quest for that ONE programming language that solves everybody's problems very easily, you can find thousands of people trained in it and has no drawbacks whatsoever. But you always end up with MORE languages but not less!

We still keep searching and we could be for a long time to come!

I am convinced that we may never find one that's perfect but they get better and better with each evolutionary cycle!

It seems like it was only like yesterday when Java was declared as a language that solved many of the problems people saw with other previous languages.

However, I see C# addressing many of the drawbacks people have seen as the problems with Java, especially when it comes to its handling of heap memory.
It appears that C# may have addressed some of these concerns very effectively but it may come with other baggage that prevents it from replacing Java or C where they are used.

Natural Language like English or French or Chinese relies upon a lot of cultural, country, history-specific idioms such as "Out of the Ball Park" or "Home Run".
Programming languages also seem to have their own sets of idioms that they deal with.

That's why we still have lots of applications written in FORTRAN or COBOL or Algol! They all have their very specific uses that other languages do not facilitate. That's why they still continue to be used. That and the fact that billions of dollars have been spent developing lots of programs in them! If they are all working O.K and print out the Paychecks in companies regularly, why mess with them?

People comfortable with some programming language may swear by it and may never want to change but learning new ones may not be avoided. This is also because of the changes in technologies currently in use. Software that used to be mainframe based became Client-server based and now, becoming again server-based with browser interfaces. That's why a lot of people switched from older languages to C to Java to do browser-based interfaces.

With the increasing use of .NET, C# usage is likely to go up if not for anything other than they work with each other better because both are from Microsoft!

And so goes the Tower of Babel story! It appears that we can never reach the nirvana of ONE universal programming language. Different strokes for different folks with different business problems to be solved. All the while, technologies are changing.

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Keyword Tags:  towerofbabel   thetowerofbabel   programminglanguages   shinar   programminglanguage   bitumen   bricks   confuse   computerscience

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