We are headed in the right direction! After years, actually decades, of talking about “high-level” programming languages we have achieved the first major increment since the time where programmers were given a means to program in something other than assembly language.I’m a computer scientist. I love programming languages. The more sophisticated (complicated) the better. Okay, so I am (and many of you our there are) a bit odd. People I meet outside of work, however, don’t usually peg me for a developer, which I like to think is a sign that I’m still at least a bit grounded in reality. I see the value in enabling a broader audience to build the tools that they need.Twenty plus years ago when I was a freshman in computer science at Cal State University Northridge the high level language was something like Pascal. I did take a course in assembly language (“in what?” say you 20-somethings ;)) and Pascal was certainly much “higher” than that. Less than a decade later I was at Indiana University studying programming languages and we were looking at things like Smalltalk. While Smalltalk goes a bit higher level, arguably we are still targeting someone who is a programmer.Did we get there with web services? I say not quite. For the first couple of years that I worked with web services, in the early 2000s, I used to refer to the “mythical” business analyst who would be composing web services into the higher level services, processes and applications they needed. My calling them “mythical” wasn’t a slight on the analyst, rather it was a slight on those of us that were providing them with the tools they needed. For example, somewhere around 2002, eRoom (later acquired by Documentum, and then by EMC) released it’s first web services interface. We talked about composite applications then and the tremendous advantage that these components offered. To leverage the interface you first used the WSDL to generate (say Java) proxy classes and now that you had a web services framework in play that offered run time support your life was “easy”. Yeah, right. Okay, the software developers were happy but the business analyst who could now build up higher value components was still mythical.Enter Web 2.0 and things have finally changed. You want the evidence? Check this out.I am working on a presentation for our upcoming EMC Software Developers Conference and on one of my slides I am talking about the soon to be released Documentum Foundation Services – a web services based interface to our content management system. Right now the slide only has text and I just want to put some type of graphic on it in an attempt to keep the neurons of my audience firing. Just a little icon that represents web services – what I want is simple, the equivalent of the COM lollypop diagram for web services. When I google “web services icons”, the first hit sounds promising “Web Services Icons +” and I have to tell you I’m thrilled. Not because I found what I am looking for but because I found something better! The icons I found are to things like Flickr, RSS, del.icio.us and digg and it dawns on me that this is the right view of web services for a far greater number of people than the numbers of traditional programmers out there. The icons for these web services don’t say a thing about how the services are implemented, no WSDL or REST, no SOAP, etc. but these things mean something to a great many people who are doing some very cools things with these services – truly creating composite applications and higher value!So my search for the right icon for the programmer continues… but what is the right icon? Hmm….