Software’s Cambrian Explosion
http://blog.slickedit.com/2008/10/softwares-cambrian-explosion/I remember when I was first learning to program, back in the early ’80s. There were a handful of mainstream languages. The Survey of Programming class I took included FORTRAN, C, COBOL, Basic, LISP, Prologue, and Pascal. Each of these languages was distinct and served a particular purpose.
You might say that each was well adapted to a particular niche in the programming ecosphere. COBOL was a business language used on mainframes to write banking applications. FORTRAN was the language used by scientists and engineers. C was the choice for writing system code and operating systems. And so on…
Likewise, there were relatively few choices for libraries and frameworks. If you wanted a graphical front-end, you could use X Windows. There were a couple of Database Management Systems available, but usually one that was dominant on your platform.
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http://blog.slickedit.com/2008/10/softwares-cambrian-explosion/
