The Mysterious Existence of A#
The programing language A#, pronounced A sharp, was first started and released in 2004. It was designed by Dr. Martin C Carlisle, Lieutenant Colonel Ricky Sward, and Major Jeff Humphries. The language was developed at the Department of Computer Science at the United States Air Force Academy. Over the years, unfortunately, A# is no longer a language people consider learning and is rarely used, if at all. Many of the websites relating to A#, such as its home page and Dr. Carlisle’s website, are highly outdated and it is difficult to find information about the language on the internet. It has been buried under almost two decades of advancement in the programming world. There are not many users of the language today, and it has fallen under the radar immensely.
Platforms
The platform that the language A# runs and executes on is the Common Language Infrastructure, otherwise known as CLI. The CLI is an open specification that describes executable code. The Common Language Infrastructure was first started in 2000 and was later standardized by Ecma in 2001 and ISO in 2003. The CLI is developed by Microsoft, a technology company based in Redmond, Washington, which creates operating system software and personal computers, and was developed in cooperation with Intel and Hewlett-Packard, two other companies that are very prominent in the tech industry. Some of the major and more often used languages that run on the Common Language Infrastructure include C#, Visual Basic .NET, and Powershell. However, A# on the other hand is rarely used, if ever.
A# uses the .NET framework, which is an implementation of the CLI by Microsoft. Microsoft started developing the framework in the late 1990s and was first released in 2002. The .NET framework’s last major update was version 4.8, released on April 18th, 2019. There is some debate as to whether .NET is going to receive any more updates, and whether it is discontinued and considered dead. While the framework may have not received any updates within the past 18 months, it is too early to even consider it dead. Even if it were, older versions such as 4.5.2 dating back to May of 2014, are still being supported to this day. Microsoft has always been keen on supporting software for many years after it has stopped receiving updates, and .NET does not seem to break this tradition. It is safe to say that .NET will still be around for a while, especially with its most used language, C#, still holding a spot as one of the most popular languages.
Trends
In today’s world, where programming jobs are opening faster than people can fill them, and the computer science industry exponentially improving every year, A# has fallen under the radar. A# has almost no users today. In fact, it may as well be considered a dead language.
Since its release back in 2004, it has lost its purpose in the programming world, and other languages have taken its place. The home page for the A# language has kept a tracker for the number of people who have visited the site since the sixteenth of May, of 2004; it has since only been clicked on 70,290 times as of February 28th, 2021. That equates to less than five thousand clicks per year, which is really low considering the fact that the programming industry has skyrocketed in recent years. Although A# isn’t exactly considered the standard today, the statistics also show that it wasn’t very popular back in the day either.
Languages such as Python and Javascript, for example, have millions of users, and developers are coding those languages professionally at numerous jobs and workplaces around the world. A# on the other hand has no job openings. Those who know how to code A# may only be doing so for fun, if there are any people even left that still use it.
Takeaway
In essence, A# is a language that, although might be remembered by name, is most likely to be forgotten within the next few years. For what it is now, the language might be forgotten already. There isn’t a whole lot of information surrounding the language, since it has been topped by other languages. Its mere history is lackluster compared to popular languages today, and its zenith never had many users considering the number of programmers out in the world today. Unfortunately, similar to spoken languages we humans use to communicate, programming languages can also disappear and never be remembered. Although anything can be found on the internet, A# was a language that emerged before the web started to increase in popularity, and therefore, not much history is documented to chatter about. Although one can be new to programming, most have heard of languages such as Java or C++. On the contrary, it is extremely rare for a new, young programmer to even know A# by name.
