Not that far from Java (no, I like to program in Ruby ) where I was born, in New Guinea alone a staggering 850 different languages are spoken. A lot of them are not just dialects. Differences can be as big as between European languages but this time on a much smaller scale. Sometimes only a few miles. An average sized town in the Netherlands could have at least 3 completely different languages when projected onto these geographic measures. For Indian people this all is probably not really new. On the Indian sub-continent, about 415 different languages have a solid base of which 23 official, among others of course Hindi and Urdu.Now you might wonder why in some parts of the world a language has a much larger footprint then in New Guinea. Well, that's easy. Because there was a uniting invader! A colleague in India (tnx William ) revealed me that although English was not an official language anymore, it was probably the very reason that India had become the powerful country it is today. Unifying people.

 

Now what about programming languages? Well, imagine that in the Dark Ages of IT only one or two languages were spoken. With the spread of computers all over the world (uhh, or sometimes just over IBM, AT&T or Microsoft buildings J), people were separated from each other and forced or tempted to come up with solutions for their specific problems. And even if they knew somebody else had struggled with the same issues, diving into the details was too much fuzz (or just no fun ). So there you are. Of course most languages came alive because originally they could handle some problems (slightly) better than others but in no time any language undergoes the tendency to become a GPL (General Purpose Language to serve anything). I am afraid that a lot of so called DSL's will eventually fall into the same pitt as well. I guess anyone could or would like to write Fortran in any language  .

 

So, who will be the unifying "invader" on the IT-planet? Sun gave it try with JAVA but is now conquered by Oracle (also a language inventor). IBM is sad because as a big (the biggest?) contributor to the world with languages, not only the language JAVA they were chasing after was "stolen" but also a widespread SQL-talking databasesystem MySQL was taken as well. Microsoft is somewhat in panic. C# and VB can only exist because Microsofts large footprint in the world but that starts to crumble away. Apple decided that they could do better on UNIX and (Objective) C then anyone else as well so they are in their own forrest. SAP had ABAP but was slowly moving towards JAVA as well but will they still do that now one their biggest competitors is the new owner? Everybody does their best to unite with HTML and XML type languages but dialects jump of faster than in New Guinea.May be it's time fot a new wave. Google already does its best?. Or perhaps the powerful Open Source community will start a new "fork". A next dialect of JAVA (plz something readable and short guys!) ... of course we already have some new hip web-talks like PHP but my opinion all those languages are just YACC's (Yet Another Computers Confusion) ... originally from Japan a few years back (tnx Matz) we see Ruby coming up as the new real OO language (and what a beauty it is but now get rid of the bugs and release confusions plz! J) ... or may be UML finally grows up, and perhaps together with stuff from companies like Adobe with FLEX, software generation is the new game ... or ...Well, I'm deaf so don't talk to me in any language ... write ("me" | "some good software") instead!