What was the last breakthrough in computer programming? (2019)
Since I left university (eighties) I have only been positively impressed by two languages. One was the Wolfram language. I haven&#x27;t used it; I&#x27;m just going on the demo here, but the idea of having not just a powerful language, but also a massive database with useful information to draw from, seems to elevate it above the usual sad collection of new ways to spell variable declarations and loops.<p>The other is Inform. I haven&#x27;t used that either, and of course it is highly domain-specific, but within that domain it seems a pretty damn cool way to write text adventures.<p>All of the graphical programming systems seem to fail the moment they scale up above what roughly fits on one screen. Labview is a disaster once it is more than just a few boxes and lines.<p>And everything else is, as far as I can tell, just the same bits and pieces we already had, arranged slightly differently. We were promised hyper-advanced fifth-generation programming languages, but the only thing that seems to come close is Wolfram, and that&#x27;s hardly mainstream.<p>I&#x27;m occasionally wondering if the whole field might not improve mightily if we stopped focusing so much on languages, and instead focused on providing powerful, easy to use, elegant, well-documented APIs for common (and less common) problems. Using something like OpenSSL, or OpenGL, or even just POSIX sockets, is just an exercise in (largely unnecessary) pain.