As you can see from the logo on the right, this year marks Grey Matter’s 25th anniversary in the business. We at HardCopy are celebrating with a redesign - which we hope you like - and with a number of articles that look back over the past 25 years in the software industry. On page 8 Graham Keitch looks back over not just 25 but a full 30 years of the Oracle database, while on page 32 Mary Branscombe talks to Grey Matter’s John Lockwood about the changing ways in which we have licensed software since 1983. However our main feature, starting on page 15, is a 10-page survey of the major software languages available today.
One thing that struck me as we put this feature together was how little we have progressed in that time. Yes, our programming languages are considerably more powerful than they used to be, while the component and software-as-service models have made software re-use easier and more prevalent. However software programming remains essentially a craft, rather than an industry...