[Joe](http://www.sics.se/~joe/) [Armstrong](http://armstrongonsoftware.blogspot.de/) hat [Erlang](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(programming_language)) erfunden und hat eine lange Zeit der Programmiersprachen-Entwicklung miterlebt.

[Hier ist mal eine aktuelle Einschätzung](http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2013-January/071949.html) über die vielen Programmiersprachen die es heute so gibt.

Hier zum gleich lesen und als Backup:

> Old timer here ...
>
> When I learnt programming (1967) ,
> I could choose between FORTRAN and (it was rumoured, Algol)
> but nobody knew anything about Algol so it was FORTRAN.
>
> The turn round time for a program was three weeks
>
> week 1 - write code on paper forms - send to computer center to be
> turned into punched cards
> week 2 - review punched cards, if ok send to machine
> week 3 - results
>
> The compiler helpfully stopped at the first syntax error which got you back
> to week 1 -
> so if you had say ten errors in your program it would take 30 weeks to get
> it running.
>
> This is a pretty good environment - teaches you not to make mistakes and to
> think first.
>
> By about 1970 I was at university and turn round times were down to 4 hours
> and you could punch your own cards - it was still FORTRAN
>
> By 1974 I got access to a computer -- a honywell DDP516 - with a colossal
> 32 KB memory.
> So the 474 pass FORTRAN compiler could compile a hundred line program in
> less than a week
> (or so ...)
>
> Things improved - I went to CERN and used the CRAY1 this could compile 100K
> lines of
> FORTRAN in 1 picosecond (ie about a zillion times slower than my mobile
> phone today)
>
> Still Fortran.
>
> In 1974 (ish) I got to play with a DEC10 - Now I could write FORTRAN,
> Basic, assembler
> and it had time-sharing (wow) turn round times of seconds. If I'd been In
> the USA I'd be Bill Gates,
> but this was Edinburgh.
>
> In 1976 I got a job programming a NORD10 in FORTRAN/Assembler and it was
> really fast
> turn round times of seconds.
>
> In 1980 ish I was still programming in FORTRAN - I forget the name of the
> machine
> all files were in one directory, no full-screen editor, no revision control
> system,
> I wrote about 150K lines of FORTRAN for it.
>
> 1985 I joined Ericsson - wow a VAX11/750 - new languages to learn. Bye bye
> FORTRAN
>
> I learnt (with various degrees of proficiency) Lisp, Prolog, awk, bash,
> smalltalk, TCL,
> and became proficient in Prolog (aggghhh - the beauty ....)
>
> I also played with just about any language I could get my hands on (ML,
> forth, ...)
>
> Then I (1986) got into my Erlang Phase (I couldn't really learn Erlang,
> 'cos it didn't exist,
> so I invented it) - it was really an outgrowth of Prolog+Smalltalk with a
> bit of error recovery
> concurrency and distribution throw in.
>
> Then I learnt (badly) C - But Mike Williams said my C was crap and looked
> like Fortran so he
> binned my C ... (why use malloc and free and pointers anyway ...)
>
> I saw C++ coming and read the book - or at least tried to read the book -
> there's a dent
> in the wall behind my piano, where the book hit the wall - Improvements to
> C should make things
> easier not more complicated, I thought.
>
> Time passed.
>
> I tried Java (not impressed, ok it's better than C++, but oh so verbose, I
> used to get
> programmers "white fingers" when programming FORTRAN you have to write
> hundreds of lines
> to do the smallest thing - Java seemed similar - so verbose) - I also
> (later) tried
> Python (ok), Ruby (ok), Lua(better), Javascript(I like :-)
>
> It's actually taken me quite a long time to learn all these languages, and
> they didn't
> all come at once. I had a good 15 years of FORTRAN - long enough to get
> good at it,
> 10 years of Prolog, 20 years of Erlang etc.
>
> I also had a long time to assimilate the new ideas - the ideas in
> programming come pretty slowly
> - once every twenty years or so somebody has a really good idea,
> programming
> today hasn't improved much in the last 20 years - it was mess then and it's
> still a mess.
>
> IDE's and revision control systems have just made matters worse - now you
> have all the
> old versions of the mess as well as the mess itself, and the IDE means you
> can't even see the mess.
>
> The best IDE in the world is your BRAIN - it's a zillion times better than
> these
> clicky things.
>
> What's this got to do with education?
>
> Suppose you're starting off.
>
> You can choose between twenty odd languages (all of them good for one
> reason or another)
> what took me 40 years to learn, you must try to understand in 2-3 years,
> this is just not possible.
>
> What languages should a beginner learn, what languages should a school
> teach?
>
> Now we get to the paradox of choice - because there are so many
> alternatives it becomes
> impossible to choose.
>
> Old timers say "choose the language appropriate to the problem" when you
> know 20 odd
> languages (with varying degrees of proficiency) this is easy to say - but
> If you know
> two languages Java and C then this isn't much help.
>
> There are literally problems where the solution in a CLP language is a few
> lines
> and is thousands of lines in C.
>
> What would I recommend learning?
>
> -   C
> -   Prolog
> -   Erlang (I'm biased)
> -   Smalltalk
> -   Javascript
> -   Hakell / ML /OCaml
> -   LISP/Scheme/Clojure
>
> A couple of years should be enough (PER LANGUAGE).
>
> Notice there is no quick fix here - if you want a quick fix go buy "learn
> PHP in ten minutes"
> and spend the next twenty years googling for "how do I compute the length
> of a string"
>
> The crazy think is we still are extremely bad at fitting things together -
> still the best
> way of fitting things together is the unix pipe
>
> find ... \| grep \| uniq \| sort \| ...
>
> and the \*fundamental\* reason for this is that components should be separated
> by well-defined protocols in a universal intermediate language.
>
> Fitting things together by message passing is the way to go - this is basis
> of
> OO programming - but done badly in most programming languages.
>
> If ALL applications in the world were interfaced by (say) sockets + lisp S
> expressions
> and had the semantics of the protocol written down in a formal notation -
> then we could
> reuse things (more) easily.
>
> Today there is an unhealthy concentration on language and efficiency and
> NOT on how things fit together and protocols - teach protocols and not
> languages.
>
> And teach ALGORITHMS.
>
> Cheers
>
> /Joe
>
> (The dates in the above are approximate)

© [Joe Armstrong 2013](http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2013-January/071949.html)

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