Skip to main content

A short comment on the future of programming languages

I've caught some recent articles and commentary asking a basic question of "What's next for programming langauges?" and I though I'd make a quick and short stab at a guess.

Considering a few elements to the soup that I think are key: the rise of dynamic languages and rapid development, the prevelence of the internet spreading word and use of multiple APIs and frameworks, and an increasing need for portability over a range of targets. I think this will lead to one inevitable move in software, but who makes it is anyone's guess.

We're going to see first one, and then many, dynamic, binary-compiled languages. We'll see things that allow two games to be written, one using Direct3D and one using OpenGL, and to compile them for the same target, using either. We'll see the ability for compilers to restructure the original code in such a way that library APIs will be more than calls to link to, but templates that will portray the intentions of the progarmmers and be able to adapt them to the target in question.

I call this "Hard Linked Libraries", but I'm sure a dozen names will surface. Python could make moves toward something like this, I'm sure. But my guess is that eventually something will surface in .Net to do things along these lines, probably using or extending generics.

I'll post more, and maybe some mockups. What do you think? Is this likely or feasable or stupid?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...
1 comment
Read more

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful...
1 comment
Read more

How To Teach Software Development

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools Education is broken. Education about software development is even more broken. It is a sad observation of the industry from my eyes. I come to see good developers from what should be great educations as survivors, more than anything. Do they get a headstart from their education or do they overcome it? This is the first part in a series on software education. I want to open a discussion here. Please comment if you have thoughts. Blog about it, yourself. Write about how you disagree with me. Write more if you don't. We have a troubled industry. We care enough to do something about it. We hark on the bad developers the way people used to point at freak shows, but we only hurt ourselves but not improving the situation. We have to deal with their bad code. We are the twenty percent and we can't talk to the eighty percent, by definition, so we need to impro...
4 comments
Read more