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Since I left university (eighties) I have only been positively impressed by two languages. One was the Wolfram language. I haven't used it; I'm just going on th

Since I left university (eighties) I have only been positively impressed by two languages. One was the Wolfram language. I haven't used it; I'm just going on the demo here, but the idea of having not just a powerful language, but also a massive database with useful information to draw from, seems to elevate it above the usual sad collection of new ways to spell variable declarations and loops. The other is Inform. I haven't used that either, and of course it is highly domain-specific, but within that domain it seems a pretty damn cool way to write text adventures. All of the graphical programming systems seem to fail the moment they scale up above what roughly fits on one screen. Labview is a disaster once it is more than just a few boxes and lines. And everything else is, as far as I can tell, just the same bits and pieces we already had, arranged slightly differently. We were promised hyper-advanced fifth-generation programming languages, but the only thing that seems to come close is Wolfram, and that's hardly mainstream. I'm occasionally wondering if the whole field might not improve mightily if we stopped focusing so much on languages, and instead focused on providing powerful, easy to use, elegant, well-documented APIs for common (and less common) problems. Using something like OpenSSL, or OpenGL, or even just POSIX sockets, is just an exercise in (largely unnecessary) pain.

feoren 5y ago
It sounds like you and Alan Kay are both expecting novel problems to be solved by new programming languages. That is an extremely inefficient way to do it: you need to come up with new compilers, documentation, standard libraries, communities, etc. Instead, programming languages have become general enough that most new problems are being solved within existing languages, instead of by inventing new ones. I have no idea what a "hyper-advanced fifth-generation programming language" is even supposed to look like. > I'm occasionally wondering if the whole field might not improve mightily if we stopped focusing so much on languages, and instead focused on providing powerful, easy to use, elegant, well-documented APIs for common (and less common) problems. But a programming language is nothing but a well-documented API! How would your suggested solution even differ from a programming language?
- agent327 5y ago
  That's not quite it. Let me explain... The first computer language I used was BASIC. It was excellent for what it was, but clearly it had a limit on how much you could do with it, on account of it missing amenities like named functions, variable scopes, etc. A 'function' was simply a line further down the program that you branched to using GOSUB. And there was only one scope, which was fine since the space available for actually writing programs was a microscopic 23KB anyway. It had for-loops, but GOTO was still very much present as a tool to control program flow. Moving on from there, I learned Pascal, which was clearly a major step up in terms of what you could achieve. Using the primitives available in Pascal (structured programming, named functions, scopes, etc.), it is possible to write larger programs than you can in BASIC: the higher level of abstraction makes it easier to reason about larger programs. From there C++ was another step up: the ability to define objects and encapsulate a great deal of implementation detail is another weapon in your toolbox to combat chaos, thus allowing you to write ever more complex programs without losing control over what they are doing. And then... there was nothing. There appears to be no step beyond object-orientation that lets you create even larger programs with even less effort. There may be languages that are syntactically easier than C++ (although after using it for a quarter century it no longer bothers me), but they just hide minor implementation details, at the cost of lower performance. That's not greater abstraction, it's just greater convenience. What we were all hoping for was that next step: languages that provided an even higher level of abstraction, allowing you to create even larger programs without losing the ability to reasoned about them. This was what 5GL promised, but which we didn't get because nobody could figure out what they would look like. Apparently we have reached a maximum level of abstraction that we can express with source. So the progression of computer languages looks somewhat like this: 1GL (plain assembly), 2GL (unstructured languages like BASIC), 3GL (structured languages like Pascal), 4GL (object-oriented languages), 5GL (not, as of yet, invented). Each level represents a clear step up in terms of abstraction, and after four steps we seem to have run out of steam, and are now mostly busy reinventing things we already had with slightly different syntax. To me, at least, that's a disappointment. My disappointment with available APIs is perhaps simply because I program a lot in C++, which inevitably means having to deal with an anemic standard library (there's not even a standardized socket interface in there), and a wild array of C-libraries. Some of these are very good, with an elegant interface design and excellent documentation, but many are just painfully bad, with virtually no documentation, and apparently every effort made to confuse the hell of out their potential users. Really, some of this could be so, so much better...

feoren 5y ago

It sounds like you and Alan Kay are both expecting novel problems to be solved by new programming languages. That is an extremely inefficient way to do it: you need to come up with new compilers, documentation, standard libraries, communities, etc. Instead, programming languages have become general enough that most new problems are being solved within existing languages, instead of by inventing new ones. I have no idea what a "hyper-advanced fifth-generation programming language" is even supposed to look like. > I'm occasionally wondering if the whole field might not improve mightily if we stopped focusing so much on languages, and instead focused on providing powerful, easy to use, elegant, well-documented APIs for common (and less common) problems. But a programming language is nothing but a well-documented API! How would your suggested solution even differ from a programming language?

agent327 5y ago
That's not quite it. Let me explain... The first computer language I used was BASIC. It was excellent for what it was, but clearly it had a limit on how much you could do with it, on account of it missing amenities like named functions, variable scopes, etc. A 'function' was simply a line further down the program that you branched to using GOSUB. And there was only one scope, which was fine since the space available for actually writing programs was a microscopic 23KB anyway. It had for-loops, but GOTO was still very much present as a tool to control program flow. Moving on from there, I learned Pascal, which was clearly a major step up in terms of what you could achieve. Using the primitives available in Pascal (structured programming, named functions, scopes, etc.), it is possible to write larger programs than you can in BASIC: the higher level of abstraction makes it easier to reason about larger programs. From there C++ was another step up: the ability to define objects and encapsulate a great deal of implementation detail is another weapon in your toolbox to combat chaos, thus allowing you to write ever more complex programs without losing control over what they are doing. And then... there was nothing. There appears to be no step beyond object-orientation that lets you create even larger programs with even less effort. There may be languages that are syntactically easier than C++ (although after using it for a quarter century it no longer bothers me), but they just hide minor implementation details, at the cost of lower performance. That's not greater abstraction, it's just greater convenience. What we were all hoping for was that next step: languages that provided an even higher level of abstraction, allowing you to create even larger programs without losing the ability to reasoned about them. This was what 5GL promised, but which we didn't get because nobody could figure out what they would look like. Apparently we have reached a maximum level of abstraction that we can express with source. So the progression of computer languages looks somewhat like this: 1GL (plain assembly), 2GL (unstructured languages like BASIC), 3GL (structured languages like Pascal), 4GL (object-oriented languages), 5GL (not, as of yet, invented). Each level represents a clear step up in terms of abstraction, and after four steps we seem to have run out of steam, and are now mostly busy reinventing things we already had with slightly different syntax. To me, at least, that's a disappointment. My disappointment with available APIs is perhaps simply because I program a lot in C++, which inevitably means having to deal with an anemic standard library (there's not even a standardized socket interface in there), and a wild array of C-libraries. Some of these are very good, with an elegant interface design and excellent documentation, but many are just painfully bad, with virtually no documentation, and apparently every effort made to confuse the hell of out their potential users. Really, some of this could be so, so much better...