[lowbloodsugar]

Is it hard to imagine that things will just stay the same for 20-30 years or longer? Here is an example of the B programming language from 1969, over 50 years ago:

  printn(n,b) {
   extrn putchar;
   auto a;

   if(a=n/b) /* assignment, not test for equality */
      printn(a, b); /* recursive */
   putchar(n%b + '0');
  }

You'd think we'd have a much better way of expressing the details of software, 50 years later? But here we are, still using ASCII text, separated by curly braces.

[SoftTalker]

I observed this myself at least 10 years ago. I was reflecting on what I had done in the approximately 30 years I had been programming at that time, and how little had fundamentally changed. We still programmed by sitting at a keyboard, entering text on a screen, running a compiler, etc. Some languages and methodologies had their moments in the sun and then faded, the internet made sharing code and accessing documentation and examples much easier, but the experience of programming had changed little since the 1980s.