The road to SQL started with Dr. E.F. Codd's paper, "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks", published in Communications of the ACM in June 1970.

Happy New Year and Decade to all software developers.  I hope you many software development successes in 2010.  Over the holiday break, I spent some time thinking about the tools that I use for my own development.  In my work at Embarcadero Technologies, I mostly use integrated development environments (IDE).

Does the world need a new beginner's programming language? In the 1960s, BASIC, FORTRAN, LISP and ALGOL were the primary introductory programming languages. In the 1970s and 1980s, Pascal, C ad Scheme were the teaching programming languages of choice. In the 1990s, with object-oriented extensions to the C language, C++ took over from C as the lingua franca for students.

When I ask developers "what programming language do you use?", the answer I usually get is a single language.  Most developers define themselves as a Java, C++, Delphi, C#, Visual Basic, PHP, Ruby or Python developer.  Some web developers will say they use JavaScript.  In fact most developers, today, use several programming languages.  Who doesn't also use JavaScript, HTML, XML, WSDL, SQL and other languages (domain specific, procedural, markup, functional, object-oriented, etc.).

The C++0x language standards committee meeting is taking place this week in downtown Santa Cruz, California, near where I live. 

C++0x is the informal name for the more formal designation: ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG21 - The C++ Standards Committee.  To unpack that:

Touch applications have been around for decades.  You see many of these early single touch applications in supermarkets, bank ATMs, restaurants and airport check-in kiosks.  With the advent of the iPhone and Windows 7, multitouch applications are entering the mainstream of hand-held and desktop computing. 

The name of this blog, Once More into the Code, is a modification of the opening line from William Shakespeare's King Henry V, Act 1 Scene 1 that starts "Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more; or close the wall up with our English dead."    As developers we are constantly diving into new projects, exploring old projects, and deeply engaged inside our current projects.  Forty years ago this month, I wrote my first program as a college freshman at Cal P