The coolest object oriented programming languages that I have ever worked with was Prograph. If you have never heard of it, you are not alone. The Prograph language never got enough market share to survive. But the fact that it is now extinct does not take away from what a great tool it was, both in terms of developer productivity as well is an intangible, off the charts, cool factor.
Wikipedia has a great introductory article about Prograph here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prograph
I worked in Prograph for several years and developed dozens of enterprise applications and utilities during that time.
I still expect some day to see some other programming language come along and do something similar. And there are people out there trying to keep the Prograph vision alive:
http://andescotia.com/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/exegraph/
I haven’t developed in Prograph for almost 10 years. But I still look back and think that was the best development environment ever! Here are some things that I liked about Prograph:
- Once familiar with the language, I could look at a function and in once glance gain an appreciation for what the function was doing. A picture is worth 1000 words.
- Prograph was way ahead of other tools for debugging and stepping through code. You could change code and data values as you stepped through a function. You could step back, change a value and run it again.
- The language used data flow instead of variables. It did not require the developer to remember variable and parameter names and freed the mind to focus on other things.
- Class and Package Diagrams were not separate elements. They essentially were the code.
- Looping was really cool. Java and C# are coming close with “for each” loops, but even those don’t really capture the conciseness of the construct in Prograph.