Future+Predictions+of+Programming+Languages


 * ﻿ ﻿ Future Predictions of Programming ﻿ Languages **

When it comes to the world of computer programming, it would be safe to say that the future is bright. And why is that so? Gone are the days when only the rich and powerful have the tools to educate them. Nowadays, a single household possesses at least one computer. There are a lot of brilliant minds out there who are constantly on their toes to bring about the latest developments in computer programming.

But this is still an ongoing vision. Somewhere in the near future, computer programming (not just computer usage) will be just another ordinary subject such as writing, reading or arithmetic. A study shows that this vision is slowly unfolding as teenagers are responding positively to programming exercises and are even able to control several virtual worlds in just a few days.

One renowned computer architect named Gordon Morrison states that computer programming is recently in a form of art. When this is so, it means that the current knowledge in programming is disorganized and changeable. He proposes further that in changing programming into engineering (which is a more precise form) then the future of programming will become more stable.

The use of hardware has progressed tremendously over the past years and software development is trailing behind. Software processes are still on the if-and-then phase and users are wondering whether this will really change. Although there are predictions that programming languages would soon be on its fifth generation (where the recent languages would become obsolete), still, this visualization still hasn’t pushed through. Which leads others to ask, has software development reached its peak? Will there be no more developments? Is this as far as it could go?

Sure, there are modernizations here and there when it comes to new languages but they remain at a certain phase. It doesn’t go a notch higher. Perhaps, software would be the technological limit that would cap computer programming advancement. According to Anders Hejlsberg languages clearly evolve slower than the hardware, simply because up to now and even after 10 or 25 years, we will be still using text to create programs.

Languages evolve slowly because they're not really technologies. Languages are notation. A program is a formal description of the problem you want a computer to solve for you. So the rate of evolution in programming languages is more like the rate of evolution in mathematical notation than, say, transportation or communications. Mathematical notation does evolve, but not with the giant leaps you see in technology. Whatever computers are made of in a hundred years, it seems safe to predict they will be much faster than they are now. If Moore's Law continues to put out, they will be 74 quintillion (73,786,976,294,838,206,464) times faster. That's kind of hard to imagine. And indeed, the most likely prediction in the speed department may be that Moore's Law will stop working. Anything that is supposed to double every eighteen months seems likely to run up against some kind of fundamental limit eventually. But I have no trouble believing that computers will be very much faster. Even if they only end up being a paltry million times faster, that should change the ground rules for programming languages substantially. Among other things, there will be more room for what would now be considered slow languages, meaning languages that don't yield very efficient code.

And yet some applications will still demand speed. Some of the problems we want to solve with computers are created by computers; for example, the rate at which you have to process video images depends on the rate at which another computer can generate them. And there is another class of problems which inherently have an unlimited capacity to soak up cycles: image rendering, cryptography, simulations. I think that, like species, languages will form evolutionary trees, with dead-ends branching off all over. We can see this happening already. Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual descendants. References

<span style="color: #404040; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">(Fitzpatrick, 2011)

<span style="color: #404040; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">(Kelly, 2005)

<span style="color: #404040; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace;">(Morris, 2008)