The History of Programming Languages [Infographic]

Rackspace recently published a nice infographic on the evolution of programming languages. It starts with FORTRAN and COBOL and runs through Ruby on Rails (which, yes, is a framework and not a language).

Unfortunately, it omits such influential languages as Lisp, ALGOL 60 and Smalltalk. But including every important language ever would make for a pretty long infographic.

The popularity stats at the end are apparently sourced from the oft criticized TIOBE. You can find the full sized graphic and bibliography here.

src: http://rww.to/qXzYH2

Java Creator Joins Google; Will Android Benefit?

James Gosling, the man who created the programming language, Java, has just joined Google.

The hire was quite the win for Google, which is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with Java’s owner, Oracle, over some uses of Java in the Android stack.

Gosling said in a blog post on the move, “I don’t know what I’ll be working on. I expect it’ll be a bit of everything, seasoned with a large dose of grumpy curmudgeon.” Call us psychic, but we’re willing to bet Gosling will be working on the Android platform.

Gosling developed Java while he was an employee at Sun Microsystems. The project began in 1991, and the language was released in 1995.

But when Sun was acquired by Oracle in a deal that closed in January 2010, Gosling left the company a few months later. At the time, he said, “Just about anything I could say [about Oracle] that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good.” He’s since been notably cynical about Oracle’s treatment of the Java language and community, even going so far as to call Oracle CEO Larry Ellison “Larry, Prince of Darkness.”

Gosling said he had turned down several “excellent” opportunities prior to signing with Google. He wrote that the new job, whatever it may entail from day to day, “looks like interesting fun with huge leverage.”

source: Mashable

Oracle Announces Release Date for Java 7

Today, Oracle announced that the Java Development Kit (JDK) 7 will be generally available on July 28, 2011. Yesterday, the company submitted the specs for Java 7 and 8 to the Java Community Process Executive Committee for approval. According to Java Chief architect Mark Reinhold's blog, the 'results should be available in two weeks.' However, as we reported recently, the Apache Software Foundation is threatening to vote against the approval of Java 7.

According to the submission materials, here's what Oracle intends to improve upon in the Java 7:

Continually improving the productivity of Java developers is critical to keeping the Java SE platform at the forefront of software development.

Exploiting the opportunities of multicore CPUs in a way that is safe and practical for developers is essential for all Java applications.

With the advent of new programming languages on the JVM it is important for the JVM to reflect the needs of language implementors, and that the Java language be able to interoperate with those languages.

In order to provide a competitive user experience Java applications sometimes need the ability to access and manipulate, in a controlled and testable fashion, the native semantics of the file system of the underlying platform.

And, also from submission materials, here's what it intends to improve in Java 8:

Exploiting the opportunities of multi-core CPUs in a way that is safe and practical for programmers is essential for all Java applications.

Modularity is a fundamental building block for developing, deploying, managing, and evolving all Java applications. Existing frameworks and tools support these tasks today, but standardization in the Java SE Platform would promote interoperability and benefit developers, users, and vendors.

Source: http://rww.to/djleRi