Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

Although it hasn’t (yet?) caught on much in industry, anyone who follows modern computing trends will no doubt have heard of D. Its Web site describes it quite nicely: D is a systems programming language. Its focus is on combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python. Special attention is given to the needs of quality assurance, documentation, management, portability and reliability. The D language is statically typed and compiles directly to machine code. It’s multiparadigm, supporting many programming styles: imperative, object oriented, and metaprogramming. It’s a member of the C syntax family, and its appearance is very similar to that of C++.

Earlier today I was reading an article about Parrot. Parrot is, as stated on the project’s Web site, “a virtual machine designed to efficiently compile and execute bytecode for dynamic languages. Parrot currently hosts a variety of language implementations in various stages of completion, including Tcl, Javascript, Ruby, Lua, Scheme, PHP, Python, Perl 6, APL, and a .NET bytecode translator.”

When it comes to judging programming languages, there are three main factors that we need to consider: programmer productivity, the application feature set that can be implemented, and the runtime performance of the developed applications. There are, of course, many others, including memory usage, portability, and implementation cost. However, memory is plentiful these days, most languages have cross-platform implementations, and many of these implementations are free or have a low cost. So the three factors mentioned in the title become the most important ones.

When it comes to programming languages and programming technologies, I think we’re getting close to a point similar to that of twenty years ago. In 1987, many enterprise software systems were being written in languages like C, COBOL, and even PL/I at some shops. Some places were ahead of the curve, and were using Smalltalk.