Interview with Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and James Gosling (2000)

http://www.gotw.ca/publications/c_family_interview.htm

by ingve • 11 years ago

56 22 11 years ago

w0000t2• 11 years ago

I also wish C++ had a large Standard library. Including <vector>, just works, you don't even have to think about it. Now imagine doing the same for <sound> or <window>.

67726e• 11 years ago

They have that. It's called Java.

siavosh4• 11 years ago

"It just feels like there's so much territory out there that's beyond the bounds of ASCII text that's just line after line, roughly 80 characters wide, mostly 7-bit ASCII, something that you could type in on a teletype. That's still where programming basically is these days, and it's proven to be a very hard thing to get anything beyond that."

Few things in programming are as stupefying and obvious as to why we all essentially still use glorified text editors to do "high-end" programming. I wonder if in a 100 years programmers will still be editing text. I'd like to think there's a paradigm shift out there but no one's found it yet.

vbezhenar• 11 years ago

Paradigm shift will occur, when we will deploy neuromechanisms allowing to directly interact with the brain. Pictures are more natural representation for our mind, so we probably will live in some super-unicode environment. No need to stick with ASCII, no need to encode "while" operator with those 5 latin letters, just some fun picture and that's all. Or may be block schemas will live again or modified block schemas. They are difficult to use with current input methods. Even with mouse it takes a lot of time to scroll and zoom big picture. And with neurointerface, when computer will show you exactly what you want in exactly millisecond you though about it, block schemas might be just perfect representation for imperative programming language. Classes might be represented in some kind of UML diagram or another similar approach.

That would be really fun time to program.

siavosh4• 11 years ago

The futurist in me thinks the following: in a 100 years programs will program themselves. We'll just need a reliable way to tell them what to program.

meddlepal• 11 years ago

I think you're sort of on to something with how the change will come when we have a true major paradigm shift in programmimg. We're not anywhere near that though.

Text and programming languages: It ain't pretty but it isn't broken so don't fix it.

GlennS• 11 years ago

How does this work if 2 or more people are working on the same program? I then have to understand what other people's pictures mean, so then not much has changed: you still have to learn the meaning of symbols, but those symbols are pictures rather than words.

In terms of representing structure with pictures, there is a further weakness in that many problems can't be neatly represented in a diagram because they have more than 3 dimensions to them.

I think you basic point still stands though: I'm sure we could be more effective about how we navigate around code and express ourselves to the computer.

voyou• 11 years ago

7000 years later and we're still communicating with glorified cuneiform. Maybe the reason we're using text for programming is because text is a really, really, good way of communicating abstract thought?

I think it's great for people to experiment with different ways of expressing programs. But I don't think the fact that programming is mostly text-based is necessarily a cause for disappointment, and my guess is that any future form of programming will look more like augmented or improved text, rather than something completely different to today's programming.

siavosh4• 11 years ago

The frustration, I think, is the feeling that a very powerful turing machine is being limited by 7000 years of biological and cultural idiosyncrasies.

pekk2• 11 years ago

But there is no better alternative. If there were, maybe we wouldn't use language to talk and give instructions to each other either.

DonaldFisk2• 11 years ago

Not many other programmers are looking, though: most are happy with C, C++, and Java.

I'm looking, however, and I think I'm on the right track. I'll need time. I'll believe I've succeeded when Lisp is no longer my favourite language.

nevster2• 11 years ago

The problem is with the input methods. With a standard keyboard and mouse, it's tedious to enter unicode characters or create other graphical-style representations.

w0000t2• 11 years ago

All ASCII characters are easily accessible. Your suggestion is a strawman, most coding is in plain text form and is typed.

I did a quick calculation a while back. I don't want to repeat it, since I lost the source, but the conclusion was that typing speed doesn't matter for programmers, since most of the time they actually think, not type. I.e. the bottleneck is information no the input of it.

seanmcdirmid• 11 years ago

The editor can just replace characters as typed, e.g. render a / as ÷.

I've implemented a whole rich code editor/language around that, here is an old essay about it:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/liveprogramming...

And a more recent version of the system:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/smcdirm/apx/in...

gp7• 11 years ago

Stroustrup: Without supporting libraries, most serous applications are unnecessarily hard in C++.

Indeed.

Interview with Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and James Gosling (2000)

Related Stories