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The first computers were limited to machine code - no, not assembly code but carefully hand-assembled binary values that then had to be meticulously and painstakingly entered through a row of switches on the front panel.

Fortunately, by the time I had my first encounter with computers things had advanced a little. Yes, I still had to hand-code my code into instruction and data values but at least I got to use a hex keypad to key it in and had a CRT display rather than just a row of lights.

Of course pretty soon Saint Bill of Redmond came along and gave us all his version of BASIC for the microcomputer and finally you could cut a half-decent program almost as fast as you could type.

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No longer did I have to keep the entire instruction set of the 8080 chip and ASCII table my head or perform hexadecimal math on my fingers and a mutant's foot. I could type stuff up in near-natural language and the interpreter would take care of all the hard stuff -- it was heaven!

Since then of course, we've seen the appearance, use and often disappearance of a myriad of different languages and development systems - some good, some bad.

Over the years I've also seen some really poor choices of development languages - such as an airline reservation system written entirely in C (ugh!).

But I've been out of the hard-core coding scene for quite a while now (this tends to happen as you get older - ever notice how programming seems to be a young-person's game?) and am left wondering what the "Language de Jour" is today.

Since a great many of Aardvark's regulars are still working at the coalface, I'd like to hear from you about the languages and support tools you're using and why.

Java was going to be the language to end all languages and make the choice of operating platform irrelevant. Write once, run anywhere, they told us.

I know this wasn't true when I was cutting Java code 6-7 years ago, but is it true now?

C++ was pitched as the successor to C and many were claiming that C# was going to be the successor to C++. Is this the case? Has C# taken over much of the work that was (at least on Windows platforms) previously the domain of C++?

Has the object-oriented paradigm completely taken over from old-fashioned procedural code? Are there new paradigms on the horizon that promise to further hike productivity and reliability?

And what's happened to those "rapid application development" systems such as Borland's Delphi?

Finally, hands up anyone who's still cutting code in either Cobol or Fortran - yes, it's time to come out of the closet!

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