Why do people keep inventing new
programming languages…?
You’d think that, by now, there must be
a language for every taste. If you like objects, you can choose
Smalltalk, Java, C# or a few hundred others that have
objects bolted on around the edges. If you want to do
every dirty trick in the book, C++ should do nicely.
Basic aficionados have a huge choice of dialects. Then
there is Cobol and Fortran, Eiffel, Lisp, APL, Rebol,
Algol, Prolog, PHP, Perl and Python.
And yet, languages still keep appearing. One of
the most interesting of these, in my opinion, is Ruby.
A fairly new language, Ruby is gaining a great deal of
interest from forward-looking programmers but has yet
to be widely adopted as a mainstream development technology.
This may be due, in part, to the lack of good development
tools (though the FreeRIDE development
environment is starting to make good progress); and it
is certainly due in part to the lack of simple deployment.
Currently the main programming framework for Ruby is
called Rails. This is a fine system which, once properly
installed, makes relatively light work of creating web
database applications such as Blogs.
However, getting Ruby and Rails up and running can be
a bit of a pain. Even on a local PC, you will have to
mess around with a number of separate components – not
only the usual combination of a server such as Apache
and a database such as MySQL but also one or more variants
of CGI. You may then have to run scripts from command
prompts and edit a number of Apache and Rails configuration
files. When I asked the Bitwise web hosts whether they
would support Ruby on Rails, I was told that – for
the time at least – they had no such plans. Frankly,
I was not surprised. They told me that they had concerns
about a number of technical issues including poor integration
with Apache and the CPanel web site control panel.
For the time being, Ruby on Rails remains an interesting
development platform which, however, you might not want
to bet the bank (or your web site) on. Even so, Ruby
is a language to watch. You can expect some in-depth
coverage in Bitwise soon.
This month, however, we are looking at a more established
language: Pascal. If you’d thought that Pascal
was dead, think again. Not only is the language central
to the Borland Developer Studio which we reviewed
last month but it has also now been integrated into Microsoft’s
Visual Studio in the form of RemObjects’ Chrome.
For more thoughts on the evolutionary struggle currently
being waged by programming languages at the moment, see
this month’s Bytegeist.
