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The Hundred-Year Language
dtolton writes "Paul Graham has a new article called "The Hundred-Year Language" posted. The article is about the programming languages of the future and what form they may take. He makes some interesting predictions about the rate of change we might expect in programming languages over the next 100 years. He also makes some persuasive points about the possible design and construction of those languages. The article is definitely worth a read for those interested in programming languages."
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Imagine cars that, before changing lanes, signal to the surrounding cars' navigation systems and they work out for themselves how to let the car into the lane. A computer can be told to slow down, rather than speed up, when someone wants to change lanes. Or detectors in the dotted yellow lines that sense when you changed lanes without signalling, and alert the traffic authority to bump your points (ala Fifth Element).
I always liked the idea of my PDA phonebook being more of a recently-used cache of numbers instead of a local store. I just punch up a number. If it's one of my commonly used ones, it comes right up (and dials, of course). But if it's not, then my PDA connects to the phone company, gets the information (and probably pays the phone company a micropayment for the service) and now I have that number locally on my PDA until it gets scrolled off if it's not used much.
Also I expect lots of pseudo-intelligent content filtering software. You'll get 1000 emails a day and your spam filter will not only remove 99% of them, but it will also identify and prioritize the remaining ones. In order for this to be useful there needs to be languages that deal with expression of rules and logic in a meaningful way (far more than just and or not). No one 100 years from now will say "if subject ~= /*mom*/" (or however the hell you say it), they will expect to say "Give email from mom a higher priority", or sometihng very close.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
The author starts be describing the effect of moore's law on computing power (i.e. computers will be wicked fast)and then starts ranting about how today's constructs are so inefficient, then admits that inefficiency won't really matter because computers will be wicked fast (And it takes him half the article to impart this wisdom).
huh!?!?
This is the kind of mental constipation that is better left for blog sites.
Somewhere there is parallel between the logic in this article and the dot.bomb busniess model.
All your base are belong to us!
I def. think that a new languange based on quantum computing will be at the forefront.
If after generations and generations of computers, we are still teaching people to talk in computer terms and not yet teaching computers how to talk in people terms, we'll have gone the wrong direction.
It doesn't matter if quantum technology is used or not, for the same reason as it doesn't matter whether a brain is a parallel or single threaded machine, whether it's made of carbon-based or silicon-based technology, etc. What matters is that it can talk to you, can understand you, and can improve life.
If you want to know what computer languages should and hopefully will look like in the future, you have only to watch Star Trek. I'm not kidding. The desire to pack computer use into a short TV program has led the authors of that show and shows like it to pare out all but the absolute essentials of describing what you want the computer to do. That is what computer programming should be like, since that's what people programming is like. People don't put up with excess verbiage, and neither should computers.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
I think that it would be better to call this article "Where Programming is headed" rather than "The Hundred-Year Language". He tries to justify how he can predict the language 100 years into the future...
It may seem presumptuous to think anyone can predict what any technology will look like in a hundred years...Looking forward a hundred years is a graspable idea when we consider how slowly languages have evolved in the past fifty.
Hmm...funny, fifty years ago, if I remember my history (since I wasn't alive back then), those relay computers needed rolls and rolls of ticker-taped punch holes to compute math. The language was so-low-level...even x86 Assembly would have been a godsend to them. And he considers something like Object-Oriented Programming a slow evolution?
All he's doing in the article is predicting what languages will be dead in the future, and which languages won't be. For example, he says Java will be dead...
Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual descendants. It is an evolutionary dead-end-- a Neanderthal language...I predict a similar fate for Java.
I'll not go there, because predicting the demise of Java is opening another can of worms. But let's just say that he really doesn't support his argument with anything other than anecdotal opinion.
I say read his article in jest, but don't look too deep into it.
Having said that, I expect that the user language should certainly be natural language -- the "computers should understand people talk, not the other way around" argument. People know what they want out of their machines, for the most part. Whether it is "change my background to blue and put up a new picture of the baby" or "Find me a combination of variables that will result in the company not failing with a probability of greater than 90%", people want to do lots of things. They just need a way to say it. Pretty much every Star Trek reference you'll ever see that involves somebody talking to the computer is an input/output problem, NOT the creation of a new technology.
It's when you build something entirely new that you need a new, efficient way to say it. Anybody remember APL? Fascinating language, particularly in that it used symbols rather than words to get its ideas across (those ideas primarily being focused on matrix manipulation, if I recall). Very hard for people to communicate about APL because you can't speak it. But the fact is that for what it did, it was a very good language. And I think that will always hold true. In order to make a computer work at its best, speak to it in a language it understands. When you are building a new device, very frequently you should go ahead and create a new language.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
I don't think it's the first order functional nature of Lisp that has allowed it to survive, but rather the "late binding" nature of it.
Static, strongly-typed languages, make the assumption that everything that needs to be known about the world is knowable at compile time. Such programs need to be recompiled (at least) and rewritten (often) because the world changes and either the source program itself or its compiled form needs to accomodate that change.
Lisp, because it delays many decisions until runtime, and because its runtime tagging accomodates datatypes that are not among the set that was declared at compile time, naturally accomodates changes in the environment around it, and naturally survives well during transitions between old and new ways to do things.
Static languages often breed static ways of thinking, and often need new static specifications at regular intervals to accomodate the mismatch with how the world really is. Dynamic languages breed dynamic thinking, which (I claim) is more robust over time.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Lisp was a very early, successful language, because it was close to a mathematical notation and easy to implement on primitive computers. I think the uathor expects Lisp to remain a vital evolutionary branch because of its mathemtical roots.
I'm not too sure though.
A programming language is a notation in which we express our ideas through a user interface to a computer, which then interprets it/transforms it according to certain rules. I expect that a lot will depend upon the nature of the interfaces we use to communicate to a computer.
For example, so far as I know people never programmed in lisp on punch cards; it doesn't fit that interface well. It was used on printing terminals (for you young'uns, these were essentially printers with terminals). Lisp fit this interface well; Fortan could be programmed either way.
If you look at languages development as an evolutionary tree, Python's use of whitespace is an important innovation. However it presupposes havign sophisticated syntax aware editors on glass terminals. It would not have been convenient on printing terminals. Perhaps in 2103 we will have "digital paper" interfaces, that understand a combination of symbols and gestures. In that case white space sensitivity would be a great liability.
In my mind the biggest question for the future of languages is not how powerful computers will be in one hundred years, but what will be the mechanics of our interaction with them? Most of our langages presume entry through a keyboard, but what if this is not true?
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In fact never. Because while its okay human languages have a few problems
Well, yeah, but doesn't a computer language suffer from the same pitfalls? If that isn't the case, why do languages tend to "evolve" over time? Why are new languages that borrow elements from other languages so prevelant?
1) Redundancy, far to many ways to say or do one thing
Isn't one of the driving principles of Perl "There's more than one way to do it"? Some say this is one of Perl's best feature, other's say it sucks.
I won't argue with the point of ambiguity. You can remove ambiguity from a "spoken" language by applying rules to it. I do think we're quite far away from being to "speak" a program, but that's because we as a culture have moved away from a _grammar_ of English. Check the courses in a university and see what first year English and Linguistic students are taking. It's not Grammar, it's Grammars. Standard written English is a thing of the past. So we won't base a language on how we actually use our language, but we could base a language on certain grammars of the language. And, isn't that something else that languages like Perl and Python try to do? They try to create more "readable" programs?
Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent. --Ludwig Wittgenstein
Sorry, Wrong and Wrong.
Comparing JavaScript and Java is like comparing a Shark to a Dolphin, quite different actually even though both animals live in the sea, and both languages use the letters J A and V. Both have cariovascular systems and both use variables and control structures. But that is basically where the similarities end.
JavaScript actually started life inside of Netscape as LiveScript, and durring the Netscape 2.0 time frame was re-named to JavaScript to ride the Java bandwagon, but thre is no realtionship at all beyond that. Compile-time type saftey? Java yes JavaScript no. Prototypes? JavaScript yes Java no. eval() of new programming code? One but not the other. Interface inheritance? Again. First Class Methods? yep, not both. Bones? Sharks no Dolphins yes (teeth don't count).
Now C# and Java, they are at best siblings but java did not beget C#. The namespace structure is straight from Ansi C++, and the primative types include Cisims like signed and unsigned varieties. You don't shed a tail and then grow it back further down the trail. The comparison here is alligators and crocidiles. Very similar but one did not beget the other, it was a closer common parent than the sharks and dolphins.
--Shemnon
Hey, I actually read the article and there's a key point that Graham makes that I don't agree with.
He makes the point to separate the details of a language into "fundamental operators" and "all the rest" then goes on to say that languages which last and have influence on future languages are the ones that minimize the number of fundamental operators. And then gives examples of things that are fundamental operators in many languages that he feels we don't need (e.g. strings, arrays, maybe numbers).
He doesn't have much to say about "all the rest". Presumabily he would move strings into "all the rest" since we would still want our languages to have functions to manipulate strings (if you think that I'm ever going to write a string tokenizer function again, you've got another thing coming).
But, I think that the basic concept of splitting up a language into these two parts is fundamentally flawed. The line between the core of the language and all the accompanying libraries of code has broken down completely. It was already falling apart in C (does anyone program C without assuming that the standard I/O library is available?). But with Java and C# the distinction is almost completely gone. Programming languages have become complete environments were you can assume that tons of libraries are naturally going to be available. And separating out a language's "fundamental operators" and it's "all the rest" is an artificial division that doesn't really work.
Well, nothing like what we have now. Assuming we survive the coming nanotech era, by 2100 computers and human brains will have totally merged. Thought itself will be the computer language of the future. Of course these 'thoughts' will be as far beyond both our current consciousness and computer languages, as we are beyond an insects.
Planet P Blog
www.enthea.org
Spoken language is far too full of grammatical bodges and fixes to become a structure logical enough for a programming language
This is a false and limited conception of the original poster's intent. Imagine having an A.I. on a PDA-type device that you carry with you from the age of 4. The PDA has a 100Terabye HD, and records/monitors your spoken words, actions, etc. After 20 or 30 years of this, your PDA probably knows you better than anyone. So if you tell your PDA "make a cool program that looks like this, and does this" there's a very good chance it understands what you mean.
Think about police sketch artists. They take vague, half remembered information...and turn it into a very accurate rendering of the original image. You have a vague idea in your mind of what you are describing, and you can't see what he/she is drawing. So you describe the person...and 5 minutes later the artist shows you a rather remarkable portrait of what you described. Which in many cases later turns out to very closely resemble the suspect. The missing link here is context. The context of shared culture and language.
If you can sit at a table and describe the basic functionality of a program, and describe its interface using words. Then your magic PDA will do the rest. It will even give you demos and visual feedback on the fly as you describe the program. It would serve as a layer between the absolutely massive context of your personal history, and the "structured" programming language required to build said program.
Please don't limit the future, it's bigger than you are.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
I believe that programs should read like novels; there should be long paragraphs of text that describe what and how the code is working followed by short bursts of actual 'dialog' that is the actual source instruction to the computer.
The actual source code (i.e. the instructions to the processor) should be surrounded by quote marks or other delimiters, and the comments (i.e. the extended code description and documention) should be the part of the source surrounded by white space characters (space, tab, cr/lf).
I never cease to be amazed at how little programming has changed since the 1960's. It really seems that the only innovation in compilier user-interface design has been that (some) compiliers will actually allow you to put your keywords and comments in color! (duh!)
If we are ever going to increase the productivity of programmers to even remotely match the vast increases in price/performance of the the hardware then we must be willing to spend large amounts of time energy and money to develop new and better approaches to writing software code.
We must abandon our kilobyte mentality to gigabyte technology!
As an example of a different approach, has anyone considered using Chinese characters arranged in a three-dimensional grid as a method of doing syncronous parallel programming? Have each character represent a complete function and have their placement in the 3-D grid space represent the point in the algorymthic process that the function should be complete. The compilier would either create the machine language or suggest other arrangements of the parallel process by rearranging the Chinese characters in the 3-D user interface.
(The fact that it sounds weird is not important. What is important is that any new idea that can help improve the productivity of programmers should be considered, regardless of how strange it may sound at the present time)
Thank you,
Heirarchy will continue to exist. It's the only concept the human brain has to deal with complexity, call it what you will but you classify and associate things in to hierarchy whether you're aware of it or not. I see no reason to believe right now that processors will have more advanced instructions than they currently do now; they may be very different (like optmisitic registers that know values before they have been calculated or something) but they will be on the same order of complexity. The atomic operations will probably remain at the same order of complexity in biological processors, quantum, or SI/GAAS/whatever based transistor processors. I don't see how sort a list will be done without some sort of operations to look at elements in it, compare them, and then change their ordering. Even with quantum computers you have to set up those operations to happen and cause results. That being said there will always be an assembly language.
On top of that there will always be a C like language, if it's not C, that will be a portable assembly language. Then there will be "application" languages built at a higher level still. That won't change, for good reasons, it's just too complex to push the protection and error checking and everything down a level. I'll give examples if you want them. The easiest one that comes to mind is something like Java garbage collection and how programmers assume that it has mystical powers and are shocked when they fire up a profiler and see leftovers sitting around, it's a very complex piece of software and you expect it to go down to a lower level? The lower levels have their own problems keeping up with Dr. Moore.
I think the other biggest area is that reliability needs to go up by several orders. Linux, BSD, Win2000 and WinXP are pretty reliable but they aren't amazing. I've seen all of them crash at one point or another, I may have had hand in making it happen and so might have hardware; either way it did. To really start to solve the issues and problems of humanity better we need to have more trust for our computers, that requires more reliable computers and that require different methods of engineering. The biggest thing going on in programming languages now to deal with that is Functional Programming. In 50 years I could see some kind of concept like an algorithm broker that has the 1700+ "core algorithms" (Knuth suspects that there are about 1700 core algorithms in CS) implemented in an ML or Haskell like language, proven for correctness, in a proven runtime environment being the used in conjunction with some kind of easy to use scripting glue. And critical low level programming will be proven automatically by an interpreter at compile time, they are already making automatic provers for ML.
The signal to noise ratio in this piece is high. There's lots of metaphors and similes to explain his otherwise very facile points.
He also seems to be contradicting himself. " Semantically, strings are more or less a subset of lists in which the elements are characters. So why do you need a separate data type? You don't, really. Strings only exist for efficiency. ", he says at one point, then a few paragraphs later says "What's gross is a language that makes programmers do needless work. Wasting programmer time is the true inefficiency, not wasting machine time.". The efficiency in implementing strings in programming languages is for the programmer, who doesn't have to use said "compiler advice" and carefully separate his strings from his other, non-string list instances and keep the two distinct in his programming model. Apparently it's "lame" to simplify text manipulation for programmers, but at the same time the efforts of programming language design should be towards making the programmer's life easier. Which is it? I know strings and string libraries have made my life a whole lot easier.
Nevertheless, I'm willing to accept the notion that eliminating strings and other complex, native datatypes and structures serves to make a programmer's use of time more efficient. But how does it do it? Graham doesn't say, he just waxes nostalgic about lisp and simpler times and languages.
I don't think the slashdot crowd needs it explained why data manipulation by computer needn't be simplified; it already is, as machine code is binary in the common paradigm. What ought to be simplified is data manipulation by humans, and on this point Graham nominally agrees (I think). This has been the thrust of the evolution of programming from machine code to assembler to high level language. Simplifying high level languages into more and more basic, statements -- getting closer to the "axioms" that Graham calls tokens and grammars -- simply reverses that evolution. It makes it easier and more elegant to compile programs, but it does absolutely zero to make the programmer's life more efficient, or easy. The whole reason high level languages were developed was precisely to get away from this enormously simple, yet completely tedious way of programming.
The overarching fallacy in this article is Graham's reliance on what is known about computation theory now to determine what programming languages would (and should) look like then. And while it's interesting to prognosticate on what the future would be like 100 years from now based on what we have today, it's not a reliable guide. Like Metropolis, A Trip to the Moon, and other sci-fi stories from the distant past, they're entertaining and no doubt prescient to the people of the time, but when we reach the date in question, the predictions are largely off the mark. It's somewhat laughable to think that despite our flying cars and soaring skyscrapers, we use steam engines to power our cities and make robots with eyes and mouths. Likewise, I don't think an honest, intelligent prediction or forecast of (high level) programming languages 100 years hence can occur without a firm basis, or even idea, of what assembly code would look like then. This, in turn, relies on a firm idea of what computer architecture will look like. Who knows if five (or fifty) years from now a coprocessor is designed that makes string functionality as easy to implement as arithmetic. Such an advance would completely invalidate Graham's point about strings and advanced datatypes, and in fact possibly stand modern lexical analysis on its head. Or if an entirely new model of computation comes to the fore. Even Graham himself admits that foresight is foreshortened: " Languages today assume infrastructure that didn't exist in 1960.", but he doesn't let that stop him from making pronouncements on the future of computing.
Graham seems to be spending too much time optimizing his lisp code and not enough on his writing. This piece of code could have been optimized had he used a simile-reductor and strict idea explanations. But it's definitely a thesis worth considering, if for no other reason than mild entertainment. C-
B
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