Bob Browning's blog

I have been using JavaScript (Node) for the last few years, but I have pretty much come to the end of my hobby project. I see that Python is very popular for server side systems., so I thought would take a look.

My history with programming languages goes back a few years. I learned coding on the Ferranti Mercury in the 1960s, and have watched fashions in coding languages change over the years. At first languages got better, FORTRAN was getter than Autocode and Algol was better than both. One day I was given a manual for NPL (New Programming Language) to evaluate. Eventually we got the compiler and a new name for the language: PL/1. It was a really good coding language that worked for both commercial and scientific coding.

I went to a demonstration of a new computer in the early 1970’s, I forget which, and the demonstrator showed us how you could develop whole systems without programming. You fill out some tables and the update and reporting screens just worked. At the time this was called a fourth generation language. Now this approach is called NOCODE.

Then the world went mad. The Unix operating system had been developed in the 1960’s in Bell Labs, and in order to port the operating system to new computers they created a programming language to write operating systems in called ‘C’. It is (and was) relatively low-level and quite unsuitable for commercial programming. However fashions in coding languages change every couple of years and it was ‘C’s turn to be the latest and greatest. 

Over the years, C became C++ which inspired Java which inspired C# which (maybe) inspired JavaScript, which runs on a server using Node – which is where this post began. There were many other languages. When I stared working with the web in the mid 1990’s the only language you could use was PERL, but that has drifted into obscurity. Then everyone was into PHP. Neither of these are the epitome of coding elegance and are long gone. Python is actually an old language, dating back to the 18980s but has popped into popularity more recently. You can get a list of the current most demanded here. Apart from JavaScript, which has a special value as the only language to program web browsers, Python comes out as the most popular. But why? This blog lists the following under “why is it so popular”:

• It is more productive (than C++ ! )
• It has a large community of users
• At is used in academia
• If has a high corporate demand

So that clears it up. Apart from the statement about productivity, presented without evidence, it is popular because it is popular.

So what is the secret sauce? I have to say, I am struggling. I have written some code using it and I am not impressed. The criticism of COBOL was always that a misplaced period could crash the code. In Python it is a misplaced space.

So where does that leave us? I was going to write a blog post about Python, but in the end the story is that Python is the last of a long list of coding languages that have become ‘the one to use’, only to be replaced after a few years by another language that is really not much better. The only substantial improvement of the technology was the addition of objects in the 1980’s. 

Remember, PHP was the future once.