The Nixon of programming languages

Do we need a language to kick around?

It seems that we do. From the earliest days of computing, people have been critical of specific programming languages.

Those who had learned machine language and assembly code were skeptics of FORTRAN and horrified at the output of the COBOL compiler.

When I joined the field, BASIC, Pascal, and C were in the ascendant, yet each had their fans. In the microcomputer arena, BASIC was dominant and thus admired by many and despised by many (with some folks living in both camps). Pascal and C had their followers, and there were other languages for the explorers (CBASIC and Forth). The clear winner in the "most despised" race was BASIC.

In the golden age of Microsoft Windows, the dominant languages were Pascal (briefly), followed by C, and then a tussle between Visual Basic and C++. Both Visual Basic and C++ were liked and disliked, with strong loyalties.

Sun and Microsoft introduced Java and C#, which pulled people away from the Visual Basic and C++ arena and into a new, complex dispute. The argument of language superiority was clouded by the assets of the run-time system and the backing vendor. To this day, people have strong preferences for one over the other.

Today we see discussions, with new languages Scala, Clojure, and Lua compared to Python, Ruby, and Java. But these discussions are less heated and more educational. They are civilized discourse.

My theory is that we use languages as a proxy for independence, and our arguments are not about language or compiler but about our ability to survive. Using FORTRAN or COBOL meant committing to IBM (despite the portability of the languages), and people feared IBM.

In the microcomputer age, programming in BASIC meant committing to Microsoft, but the relationship was complex. Microsoft owned the language, but Digital Research owned CP/M (the de facto standard operating system), so we had two brutes to fear.

Now that Oracle has purchased Sun and acquired Java, I expect the Java/C# disputes to increase. Sun was the rebel alliance against the imperial Microsoft, but Oracle is a second empire. Both can threaten the independence of smaller organizations.

I also expect that more people will be kicking Java. Those who want independence will look at newer languages; those who want security will look to Java or C#. It may be a imagined security, since the vendor can pull the syntactical rug out from under your project at any time; consider changes in Visual Basic over time.

The new languages have no large empire behind them. (Yes, Scala and Clojure live in the Java run-time, but they are not viewed as tools of the empire.) With no bogeyman behind them, there is little reason to castigate them. They have little power over us.

It is the power of large vendors that we fear. So yes, as long as we have large vendors backing languages, there will be languages to kick around.