When is the next Big Thing in
programming going to happen...?
Over the last few years - heck, over
the past couple of decades - there have been endless
variations on a theme. You want Object Orientation?
OK, you can have it with C (C++, Objective C et al) or
something that looks like C (Java and C#). You can have
it with Pascal (Delphi and Chrome) or, well, you can
have it with just about any darn’ language you
can think of.
Maybe you want garbage collection. Yup, Java does that.
Oh, and so does .NET. So now you can have flavours of
C and Pascal with objects and garbage collection.
Or maybe you prefer Basic. Well there’s Visual
Basic of course. Which, surprise surprise, also has object
orientation and garbage collection.
Is this getting to sound repetitive?
All that stuff is old hat. Smalltalk had object orientation,
garbage collection, and a full-blown integrated development
environment long people who programmed in other languages
had even heard of a computer mouse.
Prolog was another hugely ambitious and potentially
revolutionary language. Whereas other languages just
tinkered around the edges of the traditional ‘procedural’ methodology
(well heck, frankly, who really cares whether you use
curly braces or begin and end?), Prolog reinvented the
whole business of programming based on the principles
of formal logic. Instead of telling a program what it
should do and how it should do it, the programmer would
provide the program with data and facts and then ask it to find solutions.
Prolog could have been revolutionary. Sadly, thus far
at any rate, it hasn’t been. It seems that the
computer-using world at large generally just wanted programs
that did exactly what they were told to do rather than
programs that spent their time musing upon the meaning
of life. Maybe Prolog was (like Smalltalk) ahead of its
time? Maybe Prolog, or something like it, will yet, at
some future date, replace boring old C++ and Pascal?
Or then again, maybe what we need is something totally
new. Something that is as revolutionary in 2005 as Prolog
and Smalltalk were more than twenty years ago. As programs
become increasingly complex, we surely need a simpler
programming methodology. But where that will come from?
Your guess is as good as mine.
This month we’ve looked at that venerable, and
still fascinating language, Prolog; Dermot Hogan muses
upon the influence
of Smalltalk since the 1980s and Visual
Basic’s efforts to catch up with it in the 2000s;
and in my own Rants
and Raves column, I’ve been
grappling with one modern technology, Cascading Style
Sheets, and wondering why it feels so incredibly old
fashioned.
Surely that can’t the face of the future. Well,
can it….?
Huw Collingbourne
(Editor)
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