I had some spare time on my hands, and any of my friends will tell you that when I have spare time, I think about things. This time, I thought about programming languages.
That's not a surprise. I often think about programming languages. This time I thought about two aspects of programming languages that I call structuredness and immediacy. Immediacy is simply the rapidity in which a program can respond. The languages Perl, Python, and Ruby all have high immediacy, as one can start a REPL (for read-evaluate-print-loop) that takes input and provides the result right away. (In contrast, programs in the languages C#, Java, Go, and Rust must be compiled, so there is an extra step to get a response.
Structuredness, in a language, is how much organization was encouraged by the language. I say "encouraged" because many languages will allow unstructured code. Some languages do require careful thought and organization prior to coding. Functional programming languages require a great deal of thought. Object-oriented languages such as C++, C#, and Java provide some structure. Old-school BASIC did not provide structure at all, with only a GOTO and a simple IF statement to organize your code. (Visual Basic has much more structure than old-school BASIC, and it is closer to C# and Java, although it has a bit more immediacy than those languages.)
My thoughts on structuredness and immediacy led me to think about the combination of the two. Some languages are high in one aspect, and some languages mix the two aspects. Was there an overall pattern?
I built a simple grid with structure on one axis and immediacy on the other. Structure was on the vertical axis: languages with high structure were higher on the chart, languages with less structure were lower. Immediacy was on the horizontal axis, with languages with high immediacy to the right and languages that provided slower response were to the left.
Here's the grid:
structured
^
Go C++ Objective-C Swift |
C# Java VB.NET |
| Python Ruby
(Pascal) | Matlab
| Visual Basic
C | SQL Perl
COBOL Fortran | JavaScript (Forth)
slow <------------------------------------------------> <----------------------------------------------->immediate
(FORTRAN) | R
| (BASIC)
|
|
|
| spreadsheet
v
unstructured
Some notes on the grid:
- Languages in parentheses are older, less-used languages.
- Fortran appears twice: "Fortran" is the modern version and "(FORTRAN)" is the 1960s version
- I have included "spreadsheet" as a programming language
Compiled languages appear on the left (slow) side. This is not related to the performance of programs written in these languages, but the development experience. When programming in a compiled language, one must edit the code, stop and compile, and then run the program. Languages on the right-hand side (the "immediate" side) do not need the compile step and provide feedback faster.
Notice that, aside from the elder FORTRAN, there are no slow, unstructured languages. Also notice that the structured immediate languages (Python, Ruby, et al.) cluster away from the extreme corner of structured and immediate. They are closer to the center.
The result is (roughly) a "main sequence" of programming languages, similar to the main sequence astronomers see in the types of stars. Programming languages tend to a moderate zone, where trade-offs are made between structure and immediacy.
The unusual entry was the spreadsheet, which I consider a programming language for this exercise. It appears in the extreme corner for unstructured and immediate. The spreadsheet, as a programming environment, is the fastest thing we have. Enter a value or a formula in a cell and the change "goes live" immediately. ("Before your finger is off the ENTER key", as a colleague would say.) This is faster than any IDE or compiler or interpreter for any other language.
Spreadsheets are also unstructured. There are no structures in spreadsheets, other than multiple sheets for different sets of data. While it is possible to carefully organize data in a spreadsheet, there is nothing that mandates the organization or even encourages it. (I'm thinking about the formulas in cells. A sophisticated macro programming language is a different thing.)
I think spreadsheets took over a specific type of computing. They became the master of immediate, unstructured programming. BASIC and Forth could not compete with them, and no language since has tried to compete with the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is the most effective form of this kind of computing, and I see nothing that will replace it.
Therefore, we can predict that spreadsheets will stay with us for some time. It may not be Microsoft Excel, but it will be a spreadsheet.
We can also predict that programming languages will stay within the main sequence of compromise between structure and immediacy.
In other words, BASIC is not going to make a comeback. Nor will Forth, regrettably.
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