New programming language next year?

[Alfred Thompson]

Originally posted by Matt Krass
You cannot directly compare any language like that, it depends on the situation and you cannot outright say one is horrible and the other is fantastic. For example FORTRAN will blow away most languages in math crunching, even C#. But C++ can devastate VB in efficency when used properly. It's not as simple as one is good and one is bad.

Well it's not simple but I think that you can say that some languages are bad. At least on a reletive scale. When one compares OOP languages for general programming they can pretty reasonably say that Java and C# are much better then C++. Both Java and C# correct major problems with C++ and make for safer programming.

And performance often depends more on the unerlying runtime and associated libraries then on the language itself. FOr example, a lot of the really graet mathamatical things that people do with FORTRAN are do more to special libraries that have been developed for use with it then the language itself. Plus there are special purpose additions to the langauge for array processors that have been added to FORTRAN largely for historical reasons (math guys like FORTRAN) then necessaty. IF the same extensions were added to other languages they would be faster too.

Take a look at other languages as well. The JVM is slow. Someone came out with a much faster one and Sun sued the company that made it and forced them off the market. IF that hadn't happened maybe Java performance would be bettter. And the performance of VB improved greatly when the unerlying platform was upgraded to .NET. So I would not use performance as the key to what is a good language.

What you look it is things like being type safe. Like having syntax that makes it easy to create the kind of programming structures you want. And things that are basic to the language.