While reading a post about the new language Microsoft is supposed to release in their next development platform, I’ve found an alarming message in the author’s blog:
“But if all newbie programmers learn these new languages, who will manage the billions of lines of C and C++ we currently use in the future, unless it is implied to be completely be rewritten?”
I’ve heard this line of rationale before… Who will manage the billions of lines of assembly now that people use C and C++? Who will program hardware, now that Universities’ degrees only focus on high-level software?
Careful: this kind of thought is presumptuous at best. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a direct critic to the author, but to the concept. Practices and tools *need* to evolve, so we can achieve higher degrees of abstraction. Attempting otherwise only hold back evolution (and may turn us into old-school dinosaurs, who keep mumbling “back in those days, we used two big drums to program; one was called 1, the other 0″).
After all, there will always be people wanting to beat those drums… 
