The Hundred-one year Programming Language
Calendar pages blowing in the wind... Video version available on YouTube: A certain kind of software developer—or more often, businessperson— likes to talk about a hundred-year programming language, or even a hundred-year framework. That’s a pretty audacious thing to say. I mean, software development is roughly 65 years old by now. Frameworks are younger yet.…
CYBE 🌍 February 6, 2023
> (on SIMD) C never really added any kind of abstraction for them.
ISPC and various C-like GPU shading languages would beg to differ. But then the next question is: are high-level abstractions and 'compiler magic' even all that useful for SIMD, or are intrinsics the better solution?
None of those things are part of the C standard of course, but in the real world the C standard does not matter – only the feature set of actually existing compilers does.
Also I wish that obsession with the PDP-11 would finally die. C seems to be a pretty good match for all sorts of von-Neumann-computers, otherwise it would have died already.
IMHO programming languages live and die with the hardware they need to run on, a hardware which requires an entirely different way of programming will also require entirely different programming languages – it makes a lot more sense to speculate what hardware will look like in 100 years, because this will tell you what programming languages will look like.