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What Is The Future Of Programming Languages?

Posted by Cliff on from the looking-toward-the-horizon dept.

MrProgrammer asks: "With hybrid languages like C# coming down the pike, what do you see as the next advances to be made in programming? We have languages from Assembly to Visual Basic, covering what would appear to be the entire spectrum. Is there anything else to be added? Is there anything beyond OOP?"

1 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. Further simplification by satch89450 · · Score: 4

    When you look at the progression of programming languages over the years, you see a growth in complexity followed by a simplification and maturation. This cycle, I believe, will continue.

    The B language is a perfect example. It's atomic elements mapped one-for-one with the DEC PDP-7 instruction set, and included interesting shorthand that sped development. The C language fixed some of the growth pains of B; the standard mandated strong typing so that the compiler could do better what "lint(1)" tried to do. C++ tried to extend the C syntax into the object world, with some consequences good and bad.

    What I see, though, is the creation of new languages to solve specific problems in ways that are natural to the particular problem-solver. You see this with business languages that abstract several thousand lines of COBOL code in a single statement. The further abstraction makes writing certain code easier, faster, and more bug-free.

    Emphasis needs to be increased on program accuracy. Debugging has been bolted on for years; it's time for significant debugging aids to be included in languages.