So I attended a Microsoft marketing deal on Vista and the .NET 3 XAML declarative language for writing new rich applications and it seemed pretty nifty (from what I’ve seen).
A friend and I later showed one of the demo applications to someone at work and they were less than impressed. Their thought was that code was getting sloppier and less efficient as hardware improved. There’s some truth to new applications being less efficient, but I don’t think it’s because code is getting sloppier, so much as an increased use of abstraction to ease the pain of engineering large systems.
These days developers take advantage of standards-based tools and frameworks instead of spending days writing software from the ground up. It’s simple, really — why bother writing in C and dealing with Win32 when you can just drag and drop a GUI in VS.NET (or Netbeans, for that matter), and write the logic in C# (or Java) to save time? Althought performance is an issue in some spaces (e.g. medical monitoring devices, space shuttles, etc), one can use high level languages for the majority of tasks. The advantages (still decent performance, much quicker time to release, better use of resources, more features possible in the same time, etc.) out weigh the downfalls (slightly slower performance, need underlying software, etc.) in my opinion. Need more evidence? Try writing webapps using Ruby and its Rails framework, or Haynie’s Seam(less) framework.
Low level languages and development are not going away — that’s a good thing but why not write more usable, feature-filled software, when applicable?
