Bulldozer00's Blog

Rob Pike is the Google dude who created the Go programming language and he seems to be on a PR blitz to promote his new language. In this interview, “Does the world need another programming language?”, Mr. Pike says:

…the languages in common use today don’t seem to be answering the questions that people want answered. There are niches for new languages in areas that are not well-served by Java, C, C++, JavaScript, or even Python. – Rob Pike

In Making It Big in Software, UML co-creator Grady Booch seems to disagree with Rob:

It’s much easier to predict the past than it is the future. If we look over the history of software engineering, it has been one of growing levels of abstraction—and, thus, it’s reasonable to presume that the future will entail rising levels of abstraction as well. We already see this with the advent of domain-specific frameworks and patterns. As for languages, I don’t see any new, interesting languages on the horizon that will achieve the penetration that any one of many contemporary languages has. I held high hopes for aspect-oriented programming, but that domain seems to have reached a plateau. There is tremendous need to for better languages to support massive concurrency, but therein I don’t see any new, potentially dominant languages forthcoming. Rather, the action seems to be in the area of patterns (which raise the level of abstraction). – Grady Booch

I agree with Grady because abstraction is the best tool available to the human mind for managing the explosive growth in complexity that is occurring as we speak. What do you think?

Abstraction is selective ignorance – Andrew Koenig