A Modern Tower of Babel

The author discusses his theory on the reason behind the existence of many programming languages. He discusses that this has to do witha "religious" character that has beleaguered the computer-using community almost from its beginning. A classic case of religious warfare is the Mac/PC struggle, which seized the entire community and has raged for years, but there are minor struggles as well.Many software engineers favor C for systems programming because of its transportability and its precise control of hardware and processes. Similarly, many computational scientists persist in using Fortran because of its legendary efficiency and target code execution speed. Their persistence, despite the emergence of newer languages, is partly practical, but it\´s also because, as if to avoid extinction, C and Fortran have both spawned new, improved versions that incorporate emerging programming models, such as object orientation. Many science educators, as well as practitioners, value suitability. They\´ve turned to Matlab, Maple, and Mathematica because of their source codes\´ syntactic simplicity, their target codes\´ platform independence, or both. The programming community\´s Tower of Babel can therefore be viewed not only as an outcome of religious factionalism but also as a sign of healthy evolution. The existing multiplicity of languages might be a benefit and not, as the book of Genesis warns, a punishment for trying to build a path to heaven.