The Semicolon Wars

The Semicolon Wars is an excellent article –written by Brian Hayes– which explains how the languages have evolved to make it better to communicate our thoughts to the computer.

It has excellent analogies and also quite interesting facts. I did not know there were 6,912 different languages and dialects that humans use, neither that there were even more programming languages than that. What makes it even more surprising is that all these have been developed only over ~50 years!

I also liked how at the end, Hayes explains how there's always a language that we hold onto. In my case it is Java. I thought that this was because this was the first programming language I learnt but I notice that wasn't true (I had learnt Python before). I think it was because of all the programming I did in competitive programming using Java. Even though, I have never used Java in production or real projects so I am not really aware of how Java performs in those situations.

One thing that really caught my attention was that all these programming languages are develop for different features and situations and that is why there are so many different of them, because people find it easier to program in some rather than others. But what if there was no barriers to communicate what you want to program; if you could just think about it and the computer would start developing it. It would reduce the need of learning multiple programming languages and we could take more time analyzing the project and what we need to code, instead of trial and error.  I really liked this idea, however, we would first need a "brain to machine-language translator" and we would also need one that worked the other way around for code maintenance. It still needs years of AI and machine learning, but I hope we are not that far from that.