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“Visual Basic” did more for programming than “Object-Oriented Languages” did

I saw this Question and Answer in Sztywny Blog, in a post where he ask a set of questions to a bunch of really great programmers.

This question/answer is from Linus Torvalds.

What do you think will be the next big thing in computer programming? X-oriented programming, y language, quantum computers, what?

I don’t think we’ll see a „big jump”. We’ve seen a lot of tools to help make all the everyday drudgery easier – with high-level languages and perhaps the integration of simple databases into the language being the main ones. But most of the buzz-words have been of pretty limited use.

For example, I personally believe that „Visual Basic” did more for programming than „Object-Oriented Languages” did. Yet people laugh at VB and say it’s a bad language, and they’ve been talking about OO languages for decades.

And no, Visual Basic wasn’t a great language, but I think the easy DB interfaces in VB were fundmantally more important than object orientation is, for example.

So I think there will be a lot of incremental improvements, and the hardware improvements will make programming easier, but I don’t expect any _huge_ productivity help or revolutions in how people do things.

At least not until you start approaching real AI, and I don’t think real AI is going to be anything you will ever „program”.

I can’t do anything else than agree with him.

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