How Many Default Languages?


I was thinking back to my childhood, when my family first owned a computer. It was an MS-DOS-powered IBM PC. The default OS came with 2 programming environments, such as they were: GW-BASIC and batch files. It was a start, I suppose. I guess most any microcomputer you can name from that era came with some kind of BASIC interpreter. That defined the computer’s “out of the box” programmability.
Then I started wondering how this compares to computers (operating systems/distributions, really) these days. So I installed a fresh version of the latest Ubuntu Linux version (11.10 as of this writing; x86_32) and looked for programmability (without installing anything else). This is what I came up with:
- gcc/C (only the C compiler; other components of the GNU compiler collection are installed separately)
- Perl
- Python
- C#, as furnished by Mono
- Bash — can’t forget about the shell as a full-featured programming language (sh is also present, but not t/csh)
- JavaScript — since Firefox is installed per default, JS counts
- GNU Assember — thanks to Reimar for the reminder that if gcc is present, gas necessarily needs to be there as well
I checked on C++, Objective C, Java, Ada, Fortran, Go, Lua, Ruby, Tcl, PHP, R and other languages I could think of, but the above items were the only ones present by default. At the same time, I checked my Mac OS X (10.6) box and it also has Ruby and PHP installed. It has a bunch of other languages, courtesy of Xcode, so I can’t certify anything about its out of the box programmability.
Still, I think “embarrassment of riches” pretty well sums it up. I try not to be crotchety old fogey complaining that kids these days don’t know how good they have it; rather, I’m genuinely excited for anyone who wants to leap into computer programming in this day and age.
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