Talk:Second-generation programming language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The idea of "generations" of programming languages appears to have arisen as a bit of marketing jargon particularly around the epoch of the so-called "fourth-generation" languages. The proposed distinctions imply that trends in language popularity are progressive rather than being driven by a combination of marketing fads and shifting requirements.
It is increasingly obvious, however, that this is the case: while there is a broad general trend towards greater abstraction from the hardware, it is not monotonic. For instance see the decline in popularity of the more-abstract language Lisp in favor of the closer-to-hardware C and C++ in the 1980s and '90s. Nor is there a determined trend towards application specificity; see, for instance, the demise of special-purpose COBOL for general-purpose Java in business applications.
Of course, changes in language popularity are not driven entirely by marketing. COBOL lacks standard libraries to talk to Internet clients; Java has them. As talking to the Internet becomes more important for the problem domain, usage migrates to a language where it is natural: Java. Likewise in other domains: biological science programming, once dominated by Fortran, acquires a need for text processing due to the rising importance of genomics, and begins to migrate to Perl. These changes are not toward greater application specificity, but rather toward closer fit to changing application requirements.
(Indeed, the newly adopted languages often lack underlying application-specific features the old ones have: Java does not have fixed-point decimal numbers, a COBOL feature valuable for business applications.)
What's my point? The idea of successive "generations" of programming languages replacing one another at higher levels of abstraction and application specificity is not historically accurate after, say, 1960. (COBOL, Fortran, and Lisp all existed in 1960.) Wikipedia should not present it uncritically, but rather note it wherever it appears as folk-history and marketing jargon rather than historical reality. --FOo 15:23, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)
