[brlug-general] OT: Torvalds on VB

[Andrew Baudouin]

In the context of a Slashdot article dealing with a student asking questions
of great programmers, the following question was asked of Linus Torvalds:

http://sztywny.titaniumhosting.com/2006/07/23/stiff-asks-great-programmers-answers/

*"- What do you think will be the next big thing in computer programming?
X-oriented programming, y language, quantum computers, what?"


His response was as follows:

"* don't think we'll see a „big jump". We've seen a lot of tools to help
make all the everyday drudgery easier - with high-level languages and
perhaps the integration of simple databases into the language being the main
ones. But most of the buzz-words have been of pretty limited use.

For example, I personally believe that „Visual Basic" did more for
programming than „Object-Oriented Languages" did. Yet people laugh at VB and
say it's a bad language, and they've been talking about OO languages for
decades.

And no, Visual Basic wasn't a great language, but I think the easy DB
interfaces in VB were fundmantally more important than object orientation
is, for example.

So I think there will be a lot of incremental improvements, and the hardware
improvements will make programming easier, but I don't expect any _huge_
productivity help or revolutions in how people do things.

At least not until you start approaching real AI, and I don't think real AI
is going to be anything you will ever „program"

This response is unbelievably telling.  I'm floored.
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