Small programs need small languages

The history of programming languages has been one of expansion. Programming languages start small (think BASIC, Pascal, and C) and expand to provide more capabilities to the programmer (think Visual Basic, ObjectPascal, and C++). Programming languages expand because the programs we write expand.

Computer programs have expanded over the years. Books from the early years of programming (the 1970s) classify programs by size, with small programs consisting of hundreds of lines of code, large programs consisting of tens of thousands of lines, and "humongous" programs consisting of hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Today, we may still classify programs by lines of code, but most commercial applications range in size from hundreds of thousands of lines to tens of millions.

The expansionist effect on programs is tied to their single-computer nature. When a single computer must perform the calculations, then the program it runs must do everything.

Cloud computing breaks that paradigm. With cloud computing, the system may be large, but it consists of many computers providing granular services. That design allows for, and encourages, small programs. (Side note: If you're building a cloud system with large programs, you're doing it wrong.)

Cloud computing uses collections of small programs to assemble systems. Since the programs are small, the programming languages can be -- and should be -- small. That means that our strategy of language development, in which we have (mostly) striven to broaden the capabilities of programming languages, is no longer valid. Our new strategy must be to simplify, and probably specialize, our programming languages.