Programming in the Age of AI

This week, the computer world lost one of its pioneers: Professor Thomas E. Kurtz, who co-developed the BASIC programming language to create an easy-to-learn tool for students and beginners. Professor Kurtz was an inspiring innovator, and the Computer History Museum honored him as such at its 2023 Fellow Award Ceremony.

https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-memoriam-thomas-e-kurtz-1928-2024/

In the Age of AI, Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT can effectively generate code for us, but it hasn’t always been so easy. Here’s a reflection on my experiences with programming languages throughout my career:

The first high-level programming language was called FORTRAN (short for “FORmula TRANslator”), and it was developed by IBM for scientific and engineering calculations. As its name suggests, it was primarily designed for mathematical computations.

COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) came shortly after, and it was so effective at business data processing that COBOL applications are still widely used in many industries: from banking ATM networks to government agencies, from patient billing systems in healthcare to inventory management at retail stores, and even airline reservation systems. There is currently a high demand for COBOL programmers to maintain and update these legacy systems, making it an interesting career opportunity!

BASIC was released a few years later, followed by Pascal, which was initially created as a teaching tool to help students learn structured programming and data structuring. When I was a computer science student, I served as a teaching assistant for both COBOL and Pascal, so these programming languages hold a special place in my heart ??

Then came the object-oriented era, with programming languages such as C++. I remember Microsoft’s Visual Basic, with its GUI (Graphical User Interface) and seamless integration with Windows, and Sun Microsystems’ Java, which was the most popular programming language until Python took the throne.

I recently learned to program in Python. Before that, I had learned R Studio, which is great for data analysis and visualization, but Python is much more powerful! It was developed in Amsterdam by Guido van Rossum, who wanted to create a simpler and easier-to-use programming language… and he succeeded! Python is widely used for web development, data science, artificial intelligence, scientific computing, and automation, and it has become the “go-to” programming language in the age of AI. There are excellent educational videos on YouTube, and even ChatGPT can help you write code. Give it a try! #BetterAI for a #BetterWorld VxM AI