The Hundred-Year Language

 The Hundred-Year Language


Inside the software engineer filed, there is always a controversial topic, which programming language is the best? And the answer in most cases is: it depends. But this excellent article by Paul Graham, gives us an insight to a branch of this topic, which programming language is the future-proof?

Paul Graham use an example of how programming languages developed like how animal species evolve, like branches in a tree, but, as we know, some branches lead to a death end, and this behaviour also applies to the development word, Cobol is a good example about this, even do it was very useful and powerful at its time, now its seems that Cobol branch leads to a death end. But in the bright side, with each death programming language at least one good thing about it will be used in newer and better languages, so is not all waste.  

The other important factor is how computers are becoming ultra-fast, so more and more speed is stopping to be a requirement because it is now a standard. And we can see this effect in Python, it is one of the slowest or the slowest programming language, but It's now the most popular one. Mainly I will say this is because of how easy the learning curve is and the speed on how you can finish the script.

To conclude, I agree that all software developers should think if what there are learning is going to be relevant to the future, but most important is to make yourself future-proof, technology moves really fast, and if something works well now, use it, because is better to keep it simple and not sacrifice quality for something that is better for the future applications, when something else is better, you just learn it. 


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