hmm...jus wondering, given that there'r many programming languages out there, that which is the best or most popular n most likely to outlast the rest.

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Well, that's really an absurd question like "which is the best operating system"
but I think you could use a fair answer.

There is none. My favorite is assembly language [x86] but here's
a modest list of some good ones.

1)x86 assembly - closest to 1's & 0's, somewhat complex, 80% of computers
2)C/C++ - almost every system, very popular, close to low level
3)PERL - now THAT's a good one. Public domain, a mesh of others, very useful
for string manipulation.
4)PASCAL - old good stuff
5)HTML and its little additions - self explained

And in answer to your question, I believe the above will last a while,
pascal because it was so standard.

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It all depends on what you want to do. If you want to program in Windows - and you are pretty new to programming and want to learn - then I definitely recommend Delphi as a fast way to producing programs for Win32 - and its quick to learn and has a very good IDE. I have used VB but don't find its as powerful as Delphi - not as well thought out - and quite slow. The same guy who "fathered" delphi is now working for Microsoft and I believ in charge of the C# development - which means C# should be quite good in the future. Its also part of Delph 9 - ( C Sharp) so you have the best of both languages to play about with and see which you prefer. BUT - C# in Delphi requires the Dot Net environment which means you need about 200meg of stuff installed on a Windows machine to run any programs you build with it - so its not ideal. Also - Delphi 9 is not stable yet - if you can get hold of Delphi 6 - or Delphi 7 personal ( they were given free by different mags at various times ) its a great way to learn - or they may still be available at www.borland.co.uk ( or dot.com ) and will cost you nothing to try.
Mike

 

 

 

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Look at this website
http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm

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It has often been thought that as computers become more powerful the AI languages would become more popular. Looking at the list given by Zaideu, LISP is ranked 17 and PROLOG is not even on the list. It goes to show that AI languages are either to complicated or to slow to compete with procedural or object oriented languages. I started a discussion about programming paradigms and I was going to suggest embedding functional programming within an object oriented programming like JAVA. This would allow people to apply functional programming to web based applications. Logical programming sounds pretty cool but it hasn’t caught on yet either. I don’t see why it also couldn’t be embedded in object oriented programming. Then again common lisp does have object oriented capabilities so I wonder what JAVA has that common lisp doesn’t?

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You know, a year or so ago we had Prolog at uni, and we were shown that you could write one part of something you wanted in Prolog and then call it from Java. I'll be darned if I remember how, but it was quite nifty. I should look it up and see if I can find it somewhere.

Having said that I didn't really like Prolog very much.


As for the future of programming languages I think we can expect a higher degree of abstraction, it's a process that started quite some time ago and I don't see it stopping anytime soon. You can see that as time goes by we get higher and higher levels. From machine instructions in the beginning to the hoard of easily readable languages we have today.

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Well not what the actual question asked but related to the title anyways. I think programming languages are going towards achieving artificial intelligence. If you trace the history of programming languages they get easier and easier in a sense. First there was punch card operated assemblers, then fortran, pascal, c which is procedural still and c++ which is object oriented. While a program may take a dozen or two lines of code in assembler, it may take two in C. Another benefit is that you can write bigger programs so complexity of software increases with ease of programmability. So in the long run it is going towards a programming language where you just tell the compiler what kinda program you want and you'll get it. Which is AI in itself.
So then the syntax would be like: "write me a FPS game that runs faster than Doom 3"
Of course needless to say, this is a long long time away.

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You want a FPS that's faster than Doom 3? Try Doom 2.
Okay, sorry, that was a bad joke.

I think we'll see things where you can generate (at least a large part) of an application from architectual diagrams. And I must say that I wonder how many programming jobs there will be around in ten or twenty years. Well, besides legacy code mentainance jobs, making sure old programs continue working & doing small modifications.

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