Declarative programming has been around for years. You even mentioned a declarative language in your article – Erlang. And whilst declarative languages (such as Haskell or the Mathmatica example) are useful in functional, mathematical and logic problems there has yet to be what I would consider a really good “general purpose” declarative language.

I believe this factor, combined with the way computer science is taught and the already existing wealth of structured programs out there, are the reasons why declarative programming has not taken off.

I worked for a web development agency and on one of the eShops, the server would lock up after about 50 sessions! (So they had a farm of servers.) By optimising the queries and optimising some of the code, especially if() statements, the servers could suddenly handle a couple of hundred sessions each.

Using caching pushed it up even higher.

Little things, like always testing the positive in an if() statement, not the negative (if possible) are lost on many modern programmers.

Do we need new languages? Not necessarily, but if they are optimised for certain tasks or open up a new way of doing things, then there isn’t any reason for not having them. Developing a language for the languages sake or because people don’t want to use use other people’s languages (Microsoft are culprit number one here with J++ and C#, C# isn’t that bad, but it was a language for political reasons more than anything else).

What we do need is to teach programmers how to code properly! And not just designing and documenting their program BEFORE WRITING ANY CODE, but also how to best optimise that code.

I am now working on a site where the hardware dates back to 2002 and even a fully patched Windows XP SP2/3 is too much for the hardware, without getting a fully patched Office 2003 to run on it! Add in a current A/V software and the machine grinds to a halt – a bad one was a month ago, the AV company put out a patch, where it suddenly needed 30MB RAM to run; the previous patch used 8MB. On my new Toshiba laptop, with 4GB RAM and Windows 7 64-bit, I didn’t notice a problem, but the users on a 1.2Ghz Athlon with 256MB RAM complained that their machine was taking nearly 10 minutes to boot up, one user needed nearly 40 minutes for his machine to load Outlook.

The next version dropped the memory footprint back down and the machines work reasonably again and I am upgrading memory, where I can. But the developers should be forced to use the minimum specification machines to test their code, before it is released (getting unit and system testing out of the way quickly on a well specified machine is all well and fine, but it still needs to be tested against their own minimum specifications!)

http://www.classic-games.com/commodore64/64doc.html

Maybe we need only a few very different languages. Maybe some languages would be for programmers operating at a particular level of sophistication. But this discussion need a framework. Thoughts?