From: Kev Jackson <kevin.jackson@...>
Date: 2005-07-22T14:55:24+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby/Rails as a starter language?

[snip]

>KJ> produced .Net?  The next stage of C evolution?
>
>.NET is a framework and not a language !!
>If you mean C#, then this has nothing to do with 'C'.
>A next stage of 'C' might be 'D' but not '#C'
>  
>
And Java is a language, a VM specification, and a set of Libraries 
(without which a lot less would be written in it)

I see it as being (sort of) Algol/B/BCPL -> C [wait a long time] -> C++ 
-> [short while after] Java (language, libraries etc) -> C# (with .net 
libs) - in parallel there were other languages, I just see these as a 
plain evolution of Algol/C languages

At the same time there were many other languages, but you're right, at 
some point, people all just decided C++/Java are mainstream everything 
else is niche.  I remember talking to professors at Uni ('96) and they 
hated C++ and really liked SmallTalk, they also focused on functional 
languages - but for anything OO they thought that C++ was ugly and 
should be left well alone.  Soon after that (next term), we all started 
being told by the professors that Java was the thing to learn because of 
it's clean OO design - I can only assume they actually meant clean(er) 
design than C++.  It was intersting, in the space of a summer SmallTalk 
seemed to disappear except in Lnaguage Design classes (where it was 
mentioned breifly) - mainstream programming classes were C/Java (and SML 
for functional work)

So yeah I never got properly introduced to SmallTalk, but I was there 
when it seemed to vanish (in the UK at least) and no-one said why (and I 
wasn't interested enough at the time to dig into why it seemed to become 
less important in just the space of a few months).  I wonder if the 
other languages at the time vanished quite so quickly from the mainstream.

Kev