The new dinosaurs

Way back in the day, we were the young upstarts, the revolutionaries, the misfits. We were the users of microcomputers, which were later known as personal computers. We were the the people who would change the world.

We derided the mainframe users. We considered their legacy hardware bulky and clunky, hard to use, and encumbered with design decisions that favored backward compatibility. Their software was awkward too, and their languages were clumsy, lacking the modern style of our languages. "Who wants to work on those old things?" we would as ourselves, and anyone willing to listen to revolutionaries. We wanted the new, the shiney, the modern. We wanted MS-DOS and dBase II and Lotus 1-2-3, not COBOL or DB2 or CICS.

Our systems were sleek and efficient, with new designs and flexible architectures. Our languages (C and Pascal) were nimble and powerful. We were the new kings of the world, although perhaps the world did not know it. We left the dinosaurs at their table and set up our own table, and had conversations in the newspeak of PCs.

Today, I find myself in an interesting situation. Today, it is the almost thirty-year-old PC that is the clumsy beast, unable to keep up with the times. Today, the sleek and modern equipment is the iPod, the iPhone, and the netbook computers. The PC is the legacy beast, old and clumsy compared to the new equipment. Languages too have changed. The C and Pascal we considered modern are now relics. The super-modern C++ is a legacy language, the "COBOL of the nineties". Microsoft Windows is a bear, tolerated only because large corporations use it. The "new" languages of the past are now old, and languages such as Ruby, Lua, and Haskell are in the ascendent.

"Who wants to work on those old beasts?" the young revolutionaries ask. "Why use those old languages and those old PCs with their legacy compromises? Their not portable and lots of them don't even have wi-fi!"

The revolutionaries have left our table, leaving us to talk about the glory days of PCs and the conquests we made with our software. They are setting up their own table, with wi-fi and mobility and pocket-sized devices.

We have met the dinosaurs and they are us!