The Hundred-Year Language

Hi, this entry will talk about an article titled: “The Hundred-year language”, written by Paul Graham. Basically, it discusses how computer languages (and programming languages) are going or may be in 100 years. 
The author started with a curious and, in my opinion, a great comparison saying that in the same way as species, the languages (including computer or programming languages) form a kind of evolutionary tree, where some of them end as dead-ends branches. A clear example is Cobol that, despite its past popularity, it doesn’t seem to have any descendant, fact that automatically converts it in an evolutionary dead-end branch. I bet that in the great Cobol days, nobody thought that it won’t evolve, nor have descendants, nor be commonly used.

Then, the author talked about something really controversial speaking about programming languages: the supposed success of the Java language. I think that Java it’s the most known programming language and for many people the better programming language out there. Clear evidence of this is how an undergraduate student thinks that, in order to get a job or to have success later in his professional life, he has to know the Java language. 
I agree with the author that Java will end as Cobol, another dead-end branch in the programming languages evolutionary tree. Because, being honest, Java has a lot of problems and that has allowed many programming languages to grow more and better, clear examples are Python or TypeScript.

It is supposed that a programming language with a simple core, will increase its long-term survival. But is this true? We are not sure of it, we don’t know how the hardware is going to be in 100 years, or how the software is going to be coded, or if there are going to be a new “perfect” programming language. We can’t ensure that the only thing we know is that technology evolves according to human necessities and what we think nowadays, may be totally different in the future.

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