Programming Languages

[andrewducker]

bohemiancoast recently commented on the fact that PCs don't come with programming languages built in. Which is, in many ways, a good point - DOS used to come with a programming language, albeit a not terribly good one (QBasic), but Windows doesn't come with one at all.

Well, it _does_ come with Windows Scripting Host, which allows you to write VBScript applications using Notepad, but that's not of a lot of interest to most people. If you have Microsoft Office then you can write in VBA which does allow for an awful lot of functionality - you can do almost anything from there if you put your mind to it. But that (legally speaking) requires a fairly large investment, even if most people do seem to have it.

If you have .NET installed then you can use the compiler that comes with it to create anything you like, but without development tools it's not that easy to create any kind of GUI. There are free development tools out there, but they don't come with the system, so I'm not sure they count either.

With the spread of the internet, does it really matter if PCs don't come with a programming language any more? When you can have any one of a hundred different languages, IDEs and environments installed within a couple of hours, does it need to come with one? Or does the lack of a bundled language mean that people who might otherwise have had their interest piqued are less likely to investigate?

Comments

I think it *does* matter

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

With Basic built in, anyone that wanted to do anything learned Basic first, which gives you the concepts of variables, conditional statements etc. It's not a great language to learn structured programming, and totally the wrong language for OOP but it does enough for most people.

With VBA Microsoft did a great thing to provide a common standard language for automating business processes within a corporate environment.

But by not including a "standard" language with Windows, and with so many machines hooked up to the web, what *is* the "common" language? Perl? PHP? Java? JavaScript? Python? C? C++? C#? or one of a dozen other downlaodable languages? Plus do you have to learn Flash, HTML, XML etc.?

Each language is optimised for particular purposes and requires some (or more) investment from the user in learning how to do things with it (and sometimes in cost as well).

As a "general purpose" computer, the PC is starting to fail as it is increasingly seen as a machine for specific purposes (like having a swiss army knife that you mainly/only use for the corkscrew) and each of those requires/recommends different languages for that use. VBA for desktop Office applications, Perl for hacking through text files and some web back end stuff, Java for portability (but then most home users don't *need* portabilitiy, they want speed and ease of development including good debugging tools and a fast learning curve), PHP for more complex web stuff, C# for ... er .. no idea! C++ is too complex for Joe Average who wants something not much more complex than a scripting language and C/C++ etc. don't make producing GUI stuff easy.

The best general purpose home computer language turns out (I'd say) to be VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) as it is based on BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, IIRC) which was designed to be easy to use. It's still more complex than it could be, and it has been expanded and enhanced to make it even more difficult (but powerful).

Some version of VBA should be included with every copy of Windows.

All in my humble opinion of course!

Re: I think it *does* matter

[andrewducker]

Chatting to BohemianCoast over IM I've come to pretty much the same conclusion - a cut-down version of VB should be bundled with the OS.

Of course, the second you recommend bundling something new with the OS you'll hear people howl...

[odheirre.livejournal.com]

If you have .NET installed then you can use the compiler that comes with it to create anything you like, but without development tools it's not that easy to create any kind of GUI.

This is currently true. However, for Windows, the next version will be XAML enabled, which means that one can create a GUI in Notepad or any text editor. Theoretically.

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

Or does the lack of a bundled language mean that people who might otherwise have had their interest piqued are less likely to investigate?

Yeah, I think so. Never underestimate people's laziness when it comes to installing software -- especially software that they don't know what it does -- and there's just something more wondrous about "wow! I can do this!" than "wow, I could do this or this or this or this if I went and did research on what the differences actually are... nah, I'll just go play Minesweeper." The Web was more exciting when there were thousands of pages than it is now with billions of them.

[trashcanglam.livejournal.com]

I was just think the other day about how nice my old BBC B was, with a seamlessly combined OS/programming language. And BBC Basic was ace.

Oh those halcyon days of my youth...

[darkoshi]

Well, it's like babies, they don't come with a built-in language anymore, but that lets *you* choose which one they learn.

Back when PC's were new, most people who got computers were computer geeks whose main purpose was to tinker and program, so it made sense to have a programming language built-in. Well, maybe I'm wrong about that. But now anyways, most people who get computers don't plan on learning how to program them, they just want to *use* them. So why make the OS bigger by adding a built-in programming environment.