Nice write-up. I hope you do understand that the original message was a sarcastic joke.
The point was - there's just so many technologies to consider and it's been just 15 years.
When I got my first PC, my choice was: MS-DOS 3.3.
QuickBasic, Pascal, C or Assembler for writing programs.
There might have been other stuff, but I had no access to it. Ditto for documentation, tutorials or books.
Things have definetely evolved and if the rate continues, we'll have thousands of languages/frameworks in the next decade, unless something absolutely mind blowing comes up and replaces everything forever.
> I hope you do understand that the original message was a sarcastic joke.
I'm aware. I just like taking things needlessly seriously. It's a hobby of mine :)
> When I got my first PC, my choice was: MS-DOS 3.3. QuickBasic, Pascal, C or Assembler for writing programs.
Indeed, though those weren't the only choices even back then. Lots of different microcomputers, all with their unique dialects of BASIC, up until the late 80's and early 90's, when the diversity died off and IBM-compatibles became the norm.
Really, the current evolution in software is more just a resurrection of the diversity once strong in the realm of computers. Back then, one would actually have to make conscious choices about CPU architecture of all things; nowadays (for better or worse), we seem to be resigned to the idea of big machines being x86(-64) and little machines being ARM or maybe MIPS.
Not to say that languages weren't diverse back then, either. You still had Lisp and FORTRAN and COBOL and Forth and C and assembly and PL/I and ALGOL and Pascal and Logo (turtle power!). A little later there was C++ and Perl and Tcl to join them as some others faded out.
Basically, the evolution now is less about the quantity of platforms to develop for and more about the accessibility of those platforms. Pretty much all the good ones are open-source, available on the internet, and have plenty of online documentation. The free software and open source movements have been a boon to those seeking to get their foot in the door.
> unless something absolutely mind blowing comes up and replaces everything forever.
I suspect that "something" will either be artificially intelligent or pretty damn close to it. Development time and effort will decrease substantially if a programmer can just tell his artificially-intelligent software maker what the program needs to do - in a natural language - and the software-maker goes and makes a program. I suspect there will be a couple of stepping stones before that, including some existing stepping stones that we've already walked on. One of them is LLVM, providing a common core that any language can use with relatively-few obstacles. Another is the concept of programs that create other programs; languages like Ruby, Tcl, and Lisp facilitate this quite well, and it's probably a matter of time before those and similar languages are used to do things like automatically generate HTML/CSS/JS for web apps (as one example of potential usefulness in the short term). Natural language parsing by artificial electrical systems is getting better and better, too.
The point was - there's just so many technologies to consider and it's been just 15 years.
When I got my first PC, my choice was: MS-DOS 3.3. QuickBasic, Pascal, C or Assembler for writing programs.
There might have been other stuff, but I had no access to it. Ditto for documentation, tutorials or books.
Things have definetely evolved and if the rate continues, we'll have thousands of languages/frameworks in the next decade, unless something absolutely mind blowing comes up and replaces everything forever.