Bad example. People who send morse code (there are still a few) seem to care a lot about which they use. And since Edison was famous as an an extremely fast telegrapher, he'd probably be especially picky.
Oops, you've misunderstood me -- my telegraph post was, dare I say it, too telegraphic.
Yes, Edison (like all other telegraphers) must have cared a lot about telegraph key design, just as great hackers care about language design. I did not mean to imply otherwise.
What I was trying to say is that it's inconceivable that a hacker of Edison's caliber would use a single technology for his entire life, even in the (already extremely hypothetical) absence of external factors. That's because, within a handful of years, the hacker changes the tech to the point that it's no longer the same thing.
I would suggest that Edison not only cared a lot about telegraph design -- he cared so much that he took every aspect of the telegraph apart to see how it could be improved, and eventually developed the Edison telephone (http://encarta.msn.com/media_461551270_761563582_-1_1/Thomas...) along with a vast raft of other tech that was unknown in his youth.
What makes the question inane is that it assumes that "now until the end of time" is equal to or less than the lifetime of a computer language. It's not. Computer languages evolve so fast that nobody has ever stuck with one language throughout their lives. If external forces don't rewrite your language, you eventually rewrite it yourself -- you develop a bunch of libraries and restate problems in terms of them. And by "eventually" I mean "in weeks, rather than months or years" -- Steve Yegge rebuilt Rails in Javascript in less time than it took me to write this stupid post.
I suppose I could try to claim that I would be happy to be a Lisp programmer until the end of time. When someone accuses me of cheating by using Arc (which I hope to do, someday), I'll just claim that it's really Lisp. When someone needs a device driver written, I'll just claim that x86 assembly is really Lisp -- all I need to do is write the assembler in Lisp, yes? Or should I go for broke and claim that my "eternal language" is the native language of a Turing machine? It'll take me a long time to get back up to, say, Rails, but I've apparently been sentenced to spend the rest of my life at it, so why not bite off something challenging?
I wrote some Java code back in 2000, but then I stopped using the language. I picked it up again in 2003 or so, and found that it had changed.
Today, Java has generics, which I haven't studied and therefore don't understand. I believe the consensus is that you can't really be a Java programmer without understanding generics, so -- oops! -- I'm not a Java programmer anymore. My knowledge is oh-so-2003.
Tomorrow Java may get closures -- the debate rages. If it does get closures, all the Java programmers will have to update their skills or fall off the wagon.
The other day I heard a guy on a podcast talk about his disastrous attempt to test-run Drupal 3.0 (god knows why). That software is about three or four years old. Apparently it doesn't work anymore. PHP and/or MySQL and/or Apache have evolved right out from under it.
The names of all the programming languages used today are at least 10 years old. Just as the name of the English language dates back to Chaucer's time and before. Have you tried reading Chaucer?
the thing is that innovations in languages don't happen tomorrow. Though when they do happen, an experienced progammer shouldn't have any difficulty in adapting in a new feature of a language that is added to supposly to add value.
Since you reffered to natural speaking languages its obvious that it seems natural, programming languages to take characteristics of other languages as it happens in real life that they take words from each other.
