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++.

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.

When the computing world moved from manually toggling input switches to machine code encoded on paper tape, there was a vast improvement in programmer

I recently wrote about the troubles I had using the JavaScript-based Brickslayer game. Please read my earlier article to get a good idea about the numerous problems I ran into. Also read this comment to that article. Somebody going by the name joe, stated the following: quite right. JavaScript is NOT for games or animation. However for most other things on the web, it works quite well.

We’re beginning to enter a new era in computing. We’re rapidly leaving the days of uniprocessor systems. This has been the trend in the enterprise world for some time now. But with Intel and AMD releasing dual- and quad-core CPUs, and these CPUs being used even in low-end systems, they will soon become near-ubiquitous. Unfortunately, few of our programming languages and development platforms are truly equipped to handle the parallelism that we will be seeing on the typical desktop system in the near future.