The Hundred-Year Language


Today I will talk about the article titled: “The Hundred-Year Language” by Paul Graham.
The author started with a great comparison saying that in the same way as species, the languages including computer or programming languages form a kind of evolutionary tree, where some of them end as dead-ends branches. A clear example is Cobol that, despite its past popularity, it doesn’t seem to have any descendant, fact that automatically converts it into an evolutionary dead-end branch. I bet that in the great Cobol days, nobody thought that it wouldn't evolve, nor have descendants, nor be commonly used.

I think that an interpreter is a reduced version of a compiler, that is an interpreter has similar steps that a compiler has. The difference I can notice is that a compiler generates intermediate code, while the interpreter executes a line instruction. But the main feature of both is parsing and processing input using tokens and syntax analysis. It is very interesting when you realize the different applications that the basics of a compiler have.

Another thing, I believe parallel programming is going to be a key in the future of programming, and it will allow us to reach new levels of speed and efficiency in a hundred years.

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