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

[siavosh]

"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.

[voyou]

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.

[vbezhenar]

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.

[DonaldFisk]

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.

[nevster]

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.

[pekk]

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

[gp7]

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

Indeed.

[w0000t]

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]

They have that. It's called Java.