Newer Coding Languages Versus Older Coding Languages
People might think that the newer programming languages are always going to be more complicated and more advanced, given the typical trajectory of technological progress and the trend towards the fact that more complex systems are also usually proportionately more complex to learn in the first place. However, a lot of the early programming languages are full of bugs and problems. They were made with less technological input than many of the more modern programming languages, for starters.
They were also made by people who weren’t able to build on all of the experience of others, since they were the ones who were really founding the field to begin with, so they were working out the bugs literally and figuratively. People today have their experience to build on, and they have their own experience to build on, so it isn’t surprising that many of the more recent programming languages are just going to be that much more functional.
I always tell all young programmers that they’re lucky that they didn’t have to grind through a lot of the older systems, especially not in a world where computer programmers were impossibly geeky and mysterious. We’re a lot more mainstream today, and being considered geeky is a good thing today anyway.
However, a lot of young programmers today are going to be telling the programmers of the 2030s or the 2040s about how lucky they have it, when computers are going to be partly programming themselves, or maybe largely programming themselves. A lot of us are still doing everything manually today in a way that might be obsolete in the future. I honestly hope that our approach is going to be antiquated, because I just don’t like the idea of technologically enhanced people in the late twenty-first century still working through endless lines of code looking for errors. I guess I’m one of those older people who wants something better for the new generation rather than wishing that they could suffer as much as I did, and I really hope coding becomes just as easy as expected.