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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 yo

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...

hnfong 5y ago
Isn't abstraction merely an "indoctrinated" kind of convenience? Surely you can, with a huge amount of inconvenience, achieve in Pascal what you routinely do in C++, by passing "self" into function calls and manually implementing vtable lookups? :) (You might have a point with C++ templates but that's just saving yourself the trouble of a bunch of copy and pasta....) Similarly, the "2GL" to "3GL" transition merely gives you the convenience of not having to maintain a call stack. There's no magic, you just save yourself trouble of writing boilerplate code with pushing and popping pointers and stack variables. I would argue that the only reason it's considered a "paradigm shift" is merely because you were "indoctrinated" into thinking those advancements were so great that they were "more than" mere convenience. But, at least in retrospect, they are _trivial_ when compared with the advancements made in recent years (eg. Garbage Collection, Rust's safe memory management, import tensorflow, etc.). And while the old school programming language advancements surely boost programmer productivity and accuracy, I don't think it's fair to say they're more important than say the convenience of an "import fancypackage" that does 90% of the work for you. Perhaps the form of improvement is often not in a new programming language (because perhaps classical languages are "good enough" for most cases), but I know I wouldn't enjoy programming with the tools available 20 years ago. PS: I suspect your C++ perspective might also have tinted your perspective a bit. For the examples I gave as more recent advancements (i.e. GC, Rust, TF), they aren't (readily) available in C++. Sure you can say you prefer the speed of C++ which is entirely fair, but you might be pleasantly surprised if you looked outside.
- agent327 5y ago
  Indoctrination: perhaps it is, but I don't think so, since other people make largely the same distinction, as witnessed by a series of articles on wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth-generation_programming_language#Previous-generation_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth-generation_programming_l...). Although they have a slightly different definition of 4GL than the one I used. Ultimately Turing-completeness means there is no difference in what you can achieve with various languages. What matters are other things: the convenience of getting the work done, performance, etc. In my experience Pascal and C++ really do differ significantly, with C++ allowing you to automate a hell of a lot more than Pascal would. I disagree that GC is a more meaningful step forwards than, say, structured programming - this is something that is now so pervasive that it is no longer recognized for the revolution that it really was. GC is just one method of freeing memory, but it's not the only one; C++'s RAII does the same, and tracks any resource you care for, not just memory. I totally agree on the importing though. Arguably vcpkg has been a game changer in that sense. Programming 20 years ago wasn't all that bad, really. Figuring something out usually meant reading a book. There were fewer useful libraries around and they were less capable, but on the other hand, they also weren't as ridiculously complex as today's libraries sometimes are. And I'll readily admit that C++ informs my comments ;-) I mean, I've been writing C++ since 1996 or so, and for most of that, pretty much full time...

hnfong 5y ago

Isn't abstraction merely an "indoctrinated" kind of convenience? Surely you can, with a huge amount of inconvenience, achieve in Pascal what you routinely do in C++, by passing "self" into function calls and manually implementing vtable lookups? :) (You might have a point with C++ templates but that's just saving yourself the trouble of a bunch of copy and pasta....) Similarly, the "2GL" to "3GL" transition merely gives you the convenience of not having to maintain a call stack. There's no magic, you just save yourself trouble of writing boilerplate code with pushing and popping pointers and stack variables. I would argue that the only reason it's considered a "paradigm shift" is merely because you were "indoctrinated" into thinking those advancements were so great that they were "more than" mere convenience. But, at least in retrospect, they are _trivial_ when compared with the advancements made in recent years (eg. Garbage Collection, Rust's safe memory management, import tensorflow, etc.). And while the old school programming language advancements surely boost programmer productivity and accuracy, I don't think it's fair to say they're more important than say the convenience of an "import fancypackage" that does 90% of the work for you. Perhaps the form of improvement is often not in a new programming language (because perhaps classical languages are "good enough" for most cases), but I know I wouldn't enjoy programming with the tools available 20 years ago. PS: I suspect your C++ perspective might also have tinted your perspective a bit. For the examples I gave as more recent advancements (i.e. GC, Rust, TF), they aren't (readily) available in C++. Sure you can say you prefer the speed of C++ which is entirely fair, but you might be pleasantly surprised if you looked outside.

agent327 5y ago
Indoctrination: perhaps it is, but I don't think so, since other people make largely the same distinction, as witnessed by a series of articles on wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth-generation_programming_language#Previous-generation_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth-generation_programming_l...). Although they have a slightly different definition of 4GL than the one I used. Ultimately Turing-completeness means there is no difference in what you can achieve with various languages. What matters are other things: the convenience of getting the work done, performance, etc. In my experience Pascal and C++ really do differ significantly, with C++ allowing you to automate a hell of a lot more than Pascal would. I disagree that GC is a more meaningful step forwards than, say, structured programming - this is something that is now so pervasive that it is no longer recognized for the revolution that it really was. GC is just one method of freeing memory, but it's not the only one; C++'s RAII does the same, and tracks any resource you care for, not just memory. I totally agree on the importing though. Arguably vcpkg has been a game changer in that sense. Programming 20 years ago wasn't all that bad, really. Figuring something out usually meant reading a book. There were fewer useful libraries around and they were less capable, but on the other hand, they also weren't as ridiculously complex as today's libraries sometimes are. And I'll readily admit that C++ informs my comments ;-) I mean, I've been writing C++ since 1996 or so, and for most of that, pretty much full time...