Hi all,
We will be on vacation for two weeks as from today. I’ve not finished working on my paper on the situation of Internet bandwidth in Mauritius. I’ll finish it when I resume work…
Archives for July 2007
Why are there so many programming languages?
According to the Encyclopedia of Computer Languages, people have created more than 8500 programming languages over the years.
Most of the languages have never become mainstream (read Ghost in the Machine for a list of 12 languages that couldn’t take off – I don’t agree with the Haskell part as I think that it has enormous appeal and potential especially for concurrent programming)
Now for the bigger question that I’m asked from time to time:
Q: Why are there so many programming languages?
After deep thoughts, I can now answer:
A: Because a programming language is just a medium of expression and different people express themselves differently…
A corollary might be (but I think to think more about that):
Different people express themselves in different programming languages. Students, being people (after all…), also therefore express themselves in different programming languages. Hence, programming should be taught in a programming language-independent manner in order to cater for all students…
(Edited on 13/7/2007 at 23:17 MUT)
(I guess most of you have recognized the Tower of Babel by Bruegel)
Analyzing the survey data…
Thanks to David, Fezal, Bharat and Selven (and taking into account my own data), I’ve collected more than 300 measurements over the week. I owe each of them a nice lunch at Lotus and a drink :-)
As a reminder, we all downloaded a 100kb and a 1000kb file from the US and Europe three times per day (hence 12 readings) for the whole week (including Saturday and Sunday).
Now that the data collection process has finished, I am now embarking on the analysis phase. I’ll use my limited knowledge of statistics to prove (or, perhaps, disprove) the following: Mauritius Telecom is not giving us the bandwidth we are paying for and, consequently, we are being robbed of the opportunity to participate in the Web 2.0 revolution.
Of course, I’ll keep you informed. I’m setting myself the deadline of Friday 20 July to finish writing an academic paper containing this analysis.
Thanks, once again, to all those who have helped me.