Summary
Starting from the question “what programming language would you have learned 20 years ago?”, we laid out 30 years of programming language evolution. A wide-ranging journey: from GW-Basic and the DOS era to the excitement of Java Applets, from the “billion-dollar mistake” of pointers to Rust’s Borrow Checker revolution, from Anders Hejlsberg creating C# to LINQ bringing functional programming into the mainstream. The conclusion: understanding how the clock works never goes out of style.
Video
Topics
- From Basic to Assembly: our first programming experiences
- Early 90s: Java Applets, Netscape Navigator, and the World Wide Web
- The birth of C, C++, Java, and .NET — game-changing languages
- What Rust, Zig, and Go bring to the table
- The pointer concept and the “Billion-Dollar Mistake” (Null Pointer)
- Borrow Checker: Rust’s approach to memory safety
- Anders Hejlsberg and C#’s impact on the programming world
- LINQ and functional programming’s entry into the Object Oriented world
- Why every language serves a different purpose
Deep Dive
From 20 Years Ago to Today: The Forgotten Struggles of the Software World and 5 Critical Lessons That Shaped the Future
Looking back from the comfort of today’s technology, I see the evolution the software world has gone through not merely as “progress” but as a great “shakeout.” For our generation — those who got acquainted with the noise of 286 processors, who learned the alphabet of coding with GW-Basic, and who took sides in the legendary Delphi vs. Visual Basic wars — everything might look easy today. But the real matter isn’t which language we’d choose if we went back 20 years with today’s minds; it’s the wisdom of “understanding how the clock works,” distilled from the struggles of those days.
The Birth of the Internet and Java’s “Red-Nosed” Revolution
In the mid-90s, when the World Wide Web was still crawling, browsers weren’t operating systems like today — they were just tools that showed static text. In the Netscape Navigator era, the biggest spark that brought dynamism to the internet was Java.
“The first chapter of the book had that Java icon — a red-nosed character (Duke). There was a section with code to animate it in an internet browser. When you ran it, it moved in the browser. Back then nothing else did that. So having an Applet that moved was a huge deal for us.”
Java Applets, as the first serious client-side dynamic structures, paved the way for the modern web.
The Educational Value of “Struggle”: Why Do We Still Talk About C/C++ and Assembly?
Modern languages offer us tremendous abstractions — but when those abstractions become “leaky” and cause problems, the discipline of low-level languages comes to the rescue.
Before getting used to the comfort of a Garbage Collector, we had to manage memory manually. Knowing pointer arithmetic wasn’t just about a data type — it was about understanding how data meets hardware. Wrestling with Assembly — a world where writing a “Hello World” requires 10 lines of code, managing registers, and knowing DOS’s famous interrupt 21h — gives a developer the reflex to find the optimal solution.
Not Every Language Is Right for Every Job: .NET vs. Node.js
Fanaticism in software is the greatest enemy of vision. Believing that one language is the only solution to every problem is equivalent to treating everything as a nail because you have a hammer.
While Node.js creates wonders in I/O-focused work thanks to its single-thread architecture, .NET still holds its advantage in areas requiring heavy processing power, like video rendering. Even AI making this distinction and saying “you’d do better with .NET” proves the importance of knowing each language’s comfort zone.
The “Billion-Dollar Mistake” and Rust’s Unstoppable Rise
Null Pointer errors, the biggest nightmare of the C and C++ world, are known in the literature as the “billion-dollar mistake.” Rust made a revolution by solving this problem at compile time with its Borrow Checker and strict ownership rules. Even Microsoft beginning to migrate Windows kernel code to Rust shows that memory safety is no longer a choice — it’s a vital necessity.
A Minimalist Future: Zig and a World Without “Strings”
While modern languages keep bloating with new syntax sugar features, the Zig language offers a surprising minimalism. In Zig, there isn’t even a built-in String data type — text is represented simply as a U8 array. No function secretly allocates memory — if a function needs to use memory, an allocator must be passed to it as a parameter. Looking like a modern version of C, Zig is a wonderful laboratory for those who want to understand “how the clock works.”
Conclusion: Know the Gears of the Clock
Programming languages aren’t just tools — they are different problem-solving mentalities. Anders Hejlsberg, architect of Delphi, creating C# and the subsequent LINQ move forced not just the .NET world but the Java and JavaScript ecosystems as well to shake themselves up and incorporate functional features.
In a world today where AI can write code in our place, our difference can’t be memorizing syntax. AI writes code, but to understand why that code explodes, you need to know the gears inside the clock — memory management, thread structures, data models. Add the philosophy of every language to your toolkit, but never forget how the clock works.
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