Here’s an interesting quote from Jeff Attwood (emphasis is mine):
“I use implicit variable typing whenever and wherever it makes my code more concise. Anything that removes redundancy from our code should be aggressively pursued — up to and including switching languages.”
It sounded like something I’d heard before. Here’s another quote from Paul Graham:
“The kind of dirtiness Arc seeks to avoid is verbose, repetitive source code. The way you avoid that is not by forbidding programmers to write it, but by making it easy to write code that’s compact.”
I’m not in anyway claiming that Jeff is lacking originality I’m suggesting that when two influential people with a large audience express the same thought … well something ought to happen right? Perhaps programming languages are going to become more expressive and concise. This certainly seems to be one of Paul’s aims at least.
Programming is changing, that’s for sure. It seems like only yesterday that Python was new and I was bending my head around it and liking being released from static types and embracing dynamic languages. Indeed if you watch this video (and I highly recommend you do) you can get a feel for how far Python itself has come in about 5 minutes.
The point though is our industry is still evolving. Natural selection finds the best parts of all those programming languages and software products and begats them into new ones. 10 years ago I believed that the future had arrived and that we would all use C++ where performance mattered and Java everywhere else. It seems that I was hopelessly naive to believe that evolution had ended. It had scarcely even begun.
I’m also eternally grateful to the innovators and early adopters that I don’t have to write much of either C++ or Java anymore. But that’s another story.