Prognostication is always fun, whether you're thinking up your own predictions, or reading someone else's. As apparently a great many people have noted, "prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." (Was that Yogi Berra? Niels Bohr? Einstein? Mark Twain? Is it an ancient Chinese proverb?) This reality does not faze Bruce Eckel, who just posted Programming in the Mid-Future. What's the "mid-future"? About 25 years from now. Bruce starts out with:
In 25 years or so, we'll look at the current morass as only a small step above assembly-language programming.
An interesting way to look at this is to think back to the state of programming 25 years ago, in 1985. If you take that state, compare it to today's state, then "project" linearly into the future, maybe you can guess what programming witll be like in 2035. Well, certainly you can guess, but is it likely that you'd be right?
A thought experiment: pretend it's 1985, and think about what programming was like in 1960 (impossible even for me to accomplish except by referencing historical documents). What would someone in 1985 have thought programming would be like in 2010, by thinking back to the state of programming in 1960? Or, go back even further, with the aid of something like the Wikipedia's History of programming languages, and see if any longer term trends seem to remain approximately constant.
Let's try this, just for fun!
Figure 1. An artistic representation of a Turning machine (from the Wikipedia)
1935 - predates electronic computers; Alan Turing was thinking about the Turing Machine: "an infinite memory capacity obtained in the form of an infinite tape marked out into squares on each of which a symbol could be printed. At any moment there is one symbol in the machine; it is called the scanned symbol. The machine can alter the scanned symbol and its behavior is in part determined by that symbol, but the symbols on the tape elsewhere do not affect the behavior of the machine. However, the tape can be moved back and forth through the machine, this being one of the elementary operations of the machine. Any symbol on the tape may therefore eventually have an innings" (see Figure 1)
1960 - FORTRAN, LISP, and COBOL in use
1985 - C, C++, SQL
2010 - Java, .NET, Web Scripting, RIA
What is the trend? Clearly, as time progresses we work "farther away" from the hardware. Also the relation between code and memory becomes further abstracted over time. And, changes in hardware are related to changes in programming languages: the languages adapt to the available resources that new hardware provides, such as electronic memory, graphics, the Web, etc.
So, what does this point to for 2035? Thinking about hardware, many core processors should be the norm. Another clear hardware trend: hardware that can perform the same functionality (or much greater functionality) gets smaller over time. And, computers "disappear" into devices, which are no longer considered to be computers, even though they are actually computers that perform a single, specific task (mobile phones, for example). Will there still be desktop PCs in 2035? Perhaps only programmers will have them.
I'm not much for prognosticating myself. I once spent quite a lot of time coming up with some decent stock market models, but I was never able to successfully predict the longer-term future.
What are some of Bruce Eckel's predictions for Programming in the Mid-Future? He predicts that 25 years from now, the programming environment will include these features:
Extremely dynamic
Stupidly parallel objects
Persistent diskless environment
Transparency between local and cloud
Swarm testing
Security via suspicious systems
Effortless data stores
Query-based data
Reusability on a vast scale
Effortless system integration
Reusable UIs
Effortlessly scalable
Built-in evolvability
Big talk
See the full article for details, and to post your own predictions and/or hopes for programming in 2035.
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