2006 Year-End Language Version Wrapup

At the year end, to help give a sense of progress of time, we present the current versions of some of our programming language and tools favorites.

• Ada 95, though Ada 2005 is expected next year (Source: wikipedia.org)


• gcc 4.1.1, released May 24, 2006 (Source: gcc.gnu.org)


• Mathematica 5.2, released July 12, 2005 (Source: wolfram.com). Note that updates to 5.2 were released for Intel Mac platforms after that date.


• Perl 5.8.8, released Feb 2, 2006 (Source: perl.org)


• Petite Chez Scheme 7.2, released Dec 2006 (Source: scheme.com)


• Python 2.5, released Sep 19, 2006 (Source: python.org)


• Ruby 1.8.5, released Aug 29, 2006 (Source: ruby-lang.org)


• SML/NJ 110.0.7 released Sep. 28, 2000 is the most recent blessed full release, although the current working version 110.60, comes "strongly recommended". (Source: smlnj.org)
  
• Java 1.6, released Dec 11, 2006 (Source: osnews.com, Sun's site made it hard to find the exact release date)


• Eclipse 3.2.1, released Sep 21, 2006 (Source: eclipse.org)


• Apache Ant 1.7.0, released Dec 19, 2006 (Source: ant.apache.org)

We close this list with a quote from the British computer scientist who created the ML programming language when asked "Did you learn Greek or Latin?":

"I learned Greek from the age of ten and Latin from the age of eight and I regarded them both as a kind of defective form of mathematics because they were taught with such accuracy."

--Robin Milner

Source: An Interview with Robin Milner by Martin Berger.