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Marc Andreessen: A Web Odyssey

Andreeesen discusses the problems with programming languages prior to 1995 and how things changed with the development of Java, followed by JavaScript and PHP. These languages were easier to learn and allowed for easier cross platform use and quick deployment. In addition, with the meteoric drop in hardware and network costs, more powerful applications will be much easier to develop and worldwide collaboration is possible.

A personal view on programming language history, biased in favor of dynamic languages and specifically PHP (audio show).

Feel free to comment on the historical accuracy and/or Andreeesen's central argument.

By Ehud Lamm at 2006-09-21 19:41 | History | other blogs | 6822 reads

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The Age of Programmability

This presentation is, of course, related to the phenomenon I call "The Age of Programmability", to which I alluded here a couple of times. A more in depth cultural analysis is required in order to come to terms with the development, which started way before the things Andreeesen discuss happened (things like TRS-80, BASIC, and more recently mashups are part of the picture, if you want to cpature the historical development and the cultural influence of programming, for example).

By Ehud Lamm at Thu, 2006-09-21 19:55 | login or register to post comments

Just one note...

I would argue that since Java was strongly influenced by Objective-C, and that ObjC coupled with the NeXT platform was actually very easy to code in and learn, it actually started a little before Java.
By jtregunna at Thu, 2006-09-21 20:54 | login or register to post comments

What about earlier langauges?

Perl and Scheme and Lisp were cross-platform earlier. This would seem to be a problem with the argument. And Forth. These are all major languages back then and today. Forth is in Open Firmware, Perl is Perl, and Scheme/Lisp are used at MIT to teach programing, to give a few examples.

By Watson Ladd at Fri, 2006-09-22 01:07 | login or register to post comments