by Jeffrey Graf

Created on: October 17, 2008

A person interested in programming either as a hobby, career, or to assist in a technical requirement related to a career, is faced with an alphabet soup of different programming languages. What I hope to do here is help the reader visualize the trends and capabilities behind the alphabet soup.
My first programming project in the modern era, which I consider to be the Unix/C and related programming environments, was on an Altos microcomputer running Xenix in about 1982. I was working in a manufacturing engineering department, and I was interested in using a departmental computer to help write and maintain CNC control programs for the 30 plus computer controlled machining centers at the plant where I worked. The alphabet soup was very simple then. The only real choice I had as a programming was C, and it worked very well for the applications I had in mind around the engineering office. But let's keep in mind though, that I was already a degreed engineer, and had experience with many other programming languages from my undergraduate days including FORTRAN, Basic, COBOL, RPG, as well as laboratory experience interfacing microprocessors and microcontrollers. I mention this because, although C is the foundation of the modern programming, and all I am going to discuss are in relation to this, it is not necessarily a good starting place for a new programmer. C programming requires a good concept of the underlying hardware. C makes heavy use of "pointers", or addresses as data elements, and as such, a person should have a good concept of the difference between a data element and the address of a data element. If you don't know what I am talking about, just move on.

The influence of C on programming has less to do with the beauty of the language, because in fact, it is actually quite ugly. The designer, Dennis Ritchie, made use of every key on the keyboard in order to save keystrokes, and the heavy use of every ascii character available restricts the readability of the language to new users. For example, ++ denotes the INCREMENT operator, & can be a bitwise AND or a dereference of a pointer variable, || is the logical OR while | takes the bitwise OR of two data elements. Is this confusing? The point is, the starting point of modern languages is not necessarily the starting point for a new programmer.
Beginning with the introduction of windowing interfaces, or graphic user interfaces (GUIs pronounced gooeys ) trends in programming started to change. One of the first

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