Slashdot Mirror
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."
I do not know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but it will be called FORTRAN. -Attributed to many people including Seymour Cray, John Backus
Trolling is a art,
I predict that in 100 years someone, somewhere, will still be running COBOL applications.
And I will still be refusing to maintain them. Six years in the COBOL mines was six years too long...
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
I guess that programming languages are like cycles. Ah, COBOL is all coming back to me. This object orientation is way too appreciated, it is time get back to the days when VAX-admins ruled the universe of COBOL :)
Presumably many libraries will be for domains that don't even exist yet. If SETI@home works, for example, we'll need libraries for communicating with aliens. Unless of course they are sufficiently advanced that they already communicate in XML.
Let's hope it's not Microsoft's XML, because that could cause a problem with communication:they might say "We come in peace" and start shooting at us with lasers and everything!
When quantum computers come into the picture a new type of programming language and way we think about computers will emerge. Bit shifting will especially be different, it will be called... QBit shifting.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
that's VisualJavaC++.Net#
that's VisualJavaC++.Net#
That's what I was going to post, but I didn't want to give Microsoft any ideas!
PepperHacks - Hacking the Pepper Pad
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
\ Word definitions : convicted-of 0 ; \ To convict someone : murder 25 + ; : arson 10 + ; : robbery 2 + ; : music-copying 40 + ; : sentenced-to . ." years of prison" ;
And to use it:
convicted-of music-copying robbery sentenced-to
Output: 42 years of prison This looks quite like english. Of course, you can do that in many languages, but it feels more natural in Forth I think.
VIOD THING (OMFG!!!1 LOLOLOLOOL!!!)
INIT HAX0R N00B!!!
WHIEL STFU DO
GOTO 10
DOEN
--Chag
I hope it never is like spoken languages. I can hardly understand what my wife wants when I talk with her, why would a computer. Spoken languages are ambiguous.
love is just extroverted narcissism
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
When I say Java won't turn out to be a successful language, I mean something more specific: that Java will turn out to be an evolutionary dead-end, like Cobol.
Er... I don't think that Cobol is an evolutionary dead-end; in the best world, it would be extinct, but it isn't. What makes a language widely used is something that we can't predict right now - we have to watch it evolve over time, and as it grows and matures look at different aspects.
Take architecture for example - new buildings are loved the first five years because of their freshly introduced ideas. After that, all the problems start to appear - mildew problems, asbestos in the walls, and so on. During the next ten years, the child diseases are fixed. It is only a HUNDRED YEARS after the new building (or in our case, the new programming language) can be properly evaluated. The language/building then has either been replaced, or it has survived.
So - the only proper way to measure the successfulness of a programming language is to measure its survivability. Sure, we can do guesstimates along the way:
During introduction: Does the language have a good development environment? Is the language backed/introduced by a market leader?
Somewhere during the "middle years" (after about ten years): Does the language have a large user base? Does the language have a large code base?
After twenty/thirty years: ask the programmers if it really is maintainable...
Well - you get the picture! Predicting the survability of something more than five years into the future is impossible, I'd say.
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
This is a really interesting paper on the history and future of programming languages. (Check out the history chart in the middle....)
Suicide Booth: You are now dead! Thank you for using Stop and Drop, America's favorite since 2008.
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
In fact never. Because while its okay human languages have a few problems
1) Redundancy, far to many ways to say or do one thing
2) Ambiguity, "1 may be equal to x" "Sometimes allow the user to do this if they aren't doing something else that might conflict"
So what you might get is a restricted language with restricted terms that could help. But even these tend to fall down, the first UML spec was written using such a language but this was abandoned for the more formal UML language as the inherent ambiguities of languages couldn't be overcome.
So basically you might have some mechanism of translating from formal into informal but the real work will be done in a formal manner, as now, as ever because at the end of the day....
Who wants to rely on a system that implements "sometimes" ?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
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?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
javascript was orignally called livescript. Sun licensed java to Netscape for free under the condition that they change the name livescript to javascript.
http://saveie6.com/
Try this on for size: In 100 years, computer languages won't exist, or at least won't be used for anything but toy programs. Programs will be created, tested, and debugged through genetic algorithms. Nobody programmed them, nobody is exactly sure how they do what they do, and it works so well that nobody really cares to find out.
We're already to the point where it's absurd for a single person to understand the whole of a software project. Things are only going to get worse from here, and the only way out is to let the computers manage the complexity for us. As computers become faster, they'll be able to test out an ungodly number of permutations of a program to see which ones perform the fastest, or give the best results.
Just a speculation. I don't wholeheartedly believe what I just said, but I think it's a bit silly to simply assume that programming languages will be around forever.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
As any one that has worked on Natural Language Processing can tell you, natural language is a bugger. It is very context driven, and too top it all off has a good deal of redundant syntax (a, the, sv agreement, etc.) Human language is a very nice protocol for transfering ideas (It is in many ways a system designed to transmit through noisy environments by many users all of whom differ in thier individual implementation of the standard). Natural spoken form language is less good at commands, and is particularly bad for unsupervised commands.
For unsupervised commands humans tend to create something not all that different from code. A fixed set of grammar and vocabulary come into play (i.e. little slang, and very normalized style). For example:
Employees will update thier status on the In/Out board in the lobby when they will be gone for more then 15 minutes.
which is roughly:
(if (> (expected-completiontime task) 15)
(update-status out))
So the need and utility isn't there.
I'd do something interesting, but my server can't handle a slashdotting.
Ummm... how about lichen? our mitochondria? What about the parasitic relationships that become mutually beneficial, such as the numerous bacteria in our gut and on our skin, and then eventually become necessary for life?
Merging actually does happen -- it just doesn't happen in the way he was thinking, that DNA become identical and cross-species fertility occurs. Rather, the two organisms live closer and closer, until they merge.
Come to think of it, although it isn't on the species level, the concept of merging species isn't too different than sexual reproduction.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
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
I thought Chomsky had a lot to say about this.
Structurally, spoken languages and computer languages are very similar:
Phonetics: sounds
Phonology: sounds in relation to one another
Morphology: words
Syntax: structure (words in relation to one another)
Semantics: meaning
Pragmatics: meaning in context.
Morphology, Syntax and Semantics are shared by human and computer languages. Arguments could be made about phonology, too, but not by me. Some computer langauges might even have pragmatics. (Example of pragmatics: when one says "it's hot in here" one means, 1) it's hot in here and 2) somebody get off their ass and open the damned window). I'm not familiar enough with computing languages to say if a command means one thing in one instance and means something else in another instance, or has two meanings simultaneously.
Human language is full of redundancies. Some computing languages have some redundancies. Perl springs to mind (no wonder... Larry Wall was a linguist) with its "there's more than one way to do it" creed.
I don't think computing languages will reach the full complexity and redundancy of human language. One main reason is because human language is an extension of the human though process. Now, if you want to read the previous posting about the Turing Test, please, feel free....
In the world 100 years from now, you don't program the computer ... the computer programs YOU!
To anyone that has studied theoretical computer science and/or programming languages knows that such reductionism is a fallacy. "...the fewer, the better..."
It turns out that its better to strike a balance, where you make the formal mathematical system (what a programming language is after all) as simple as possible, until you get to the point where making it more simple makes it more complicated. Or in other words, making it more simple would cloud the mathematical structures that you are describing.
Here are some examples of reductionism gone too far: Sheffer stroke, X = \z.zKSK, one instruction assembler, etc...
The only logical connective you need is the sheffer stroke... but thats of no use to us as it is easier to more connectives such as conjunction, disjunction, implication, and negation.
The only combinator you need is X, and you can compute anything... but making use of other combinators... or better yet the lambda-calculus is more useful.
Point is that we need more powerful tools that we can actually use, and there is no simple description of what makes one tool better than another. Applying reductionism can result in nothing special.
The true places to look for what the future brings with regards to programming languages are the following:
1. Mobile-Calculi: pi-calculus, etc...
2. Substructural Logics: linear-logic, etc...
3. Category Theory: It is big on structure, which is useful to computer scientists.
English actually doesn't really have a written Grammar BTW, English was the language of the poor people not of the gentry therefore it evolved as a loosely ruled language rather than as a language with definate constructs like proscribed Latin or modern German.
Basically English is the language of plebs, the rich and diplomats spoke French. The idea of a grammar was retro-fitted by the Victorians who applied Latin rules to English which just don't fit.
Lets put it this way, in English you can screw with the language as much as you want and it continues to change every year. This is fine as it makes it a rich communication tool.
What other languages can use one word to make an entire sentence ?
F*ck's F*ckers F*cking F*cked
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
i think strings mainly exist because of usability considerations - from the developers point of view. they provide a compact notation for "list of characters". furthermore, most languages come with string routines/classes/operators that are a lot more powerful and flexible than their list-equivalent.
efficiency definitely is a consideration, but not the main one.
No need to mention they will agree with operators: (defop + a b (+ a b))
That was a joke and you can do similar thing even today. Seriously, I very agree with these three quotes:
- "Lisp is a programmable programming language." - John Foderaro, CACM, September 1991;
- "Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material." - Alan Kay
pad;
- "Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." - Phil Greenspun;
Thus, I think that if underlying language for the most of OS components would be something like LISP than the whole concept of programming would be different. It could not happen before being limited by available hardware performance and quality of LISP implementations. But samething was about Java.So, if there will be a commercial effort to push LISP again to the market as underlying metalanguage then, if not in 100 then in 2 or about years, we may see all programming languages being "LISP-derived". Add here that LISP syntax is semantically much better than XML, but still same parser-unified. The only problem with LISP today is that it's not so "distributed" like Erlang. Fix it and you'll get the language of the nearest future.
---
I don't know the future. I barely remember the past. I see the present very blur. Time doesn't exist. The reason is irrational. The space is irrelevant. There is no me.
Less is more !
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 found it interesting that right at the outset he dismissed Java as an "evolutionary dead-end" with no explanation of that comment in the whole article.
The points he makes about what the good languages are seem to show that Java is indeed a good language. Specifically it has an additional layer that allows for abstraction from the hardware/operating system for portability. It takes care of mundane details for the programmer (garbage collection, no need to worry about dealing with memory directly, etc).
Basically the article seemed to repeat itself a lot and show that Java does indeed have a lot of good qualities that he thinks will be in future languages. He also dismisses Object-Oriented programming as the cause for "spaggetti code" without giving any justification for that statement. Finally, he slips in a nice ad hominium attack there by saying any "reasonably competent" programmer knows that object-oriented code sucks.
I think the author's own biases hurt his argument greatly.
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.
So, an episode of stark trek for you goes like:
Picard> Computer, calculate the time needed for repairs.
Computer> What?
Picard> Calculate the time needed to repair the impulse drive.
Computer> The impulse drive cannot be repaired.
Picard> I mean to patch it up sufficiently such that the ship can move.
Computer> The ship can already move, we are being accelerated by nearby gravity well.
Picard> (In frustration perhaps) Calculate the time needed to recalibrate the impulse generation coils, considering that ion capacitor was functioning within normal parameters. (or some other jargon)
Computer> (Finally having an answerable question) Recalibration will require 14 minutes. (This does not mean that they will be fully "repaired", just they they will be enough to perhaps be usefull )
And as for Asimov's silly laws: they are a contradiction in terms. Any routine capable of enforcing such rules upon the AI would have to be AI itself. Therefore such rules are a paradox in that they cannot be implemented. Any working AI would be fully subject to its own volition.
All other checks and balances are MEANINGLESS. No matter how well built a fortress is, with zero sentient creatures guarding in, it is defenseless.
No matter how strong a weapon, unwielded, it is powerless.
...Neither of which has done anything to advance the state of the art in programming languages, even if your claim were true.
The one thing I have confidence in about programming in the future is that sooner or later, the tools and techniques with genuine advantages will beat the "useful hacks". Java, C++, VB and their ilk are widely used today because they can get a job done, and there's not much better around that gets the same job done as easily.
Sure, there are languages that are technically superior, but they're so cumbersome to use that no-one really notices them, and when they do, you don't have the powerful development tools, the established code base of useful libraries, the established user base of developers to hire, etc. When we get to the point that languages with more solid underlying models catch up on ease of use, then we'll relegate the useful hacks to their place in history as just that. Until then, we'll keep using the useful hacks because we have jobs to do, but don't expect the tools of the future to be built on them.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Language structure is determined by two things:
1. the target machine architecture
2. the range of expression required by the programmer and/or workgroup
Java is "successful" but it really looks a lot like Algol and Pascal,
as does C++. The range of expression is greater in the newer languages
(object-orientation in Java and C++) but the forte is still that of
expressing algorithms in written form to be used on a stored-program
digital computer.
WILL WE STILL BE PROGRAMMING?
Take one example -- genetic programming. If you had a programming system
where the basic algorithm could learn, and all you had to do is set up
the learning environment, then you'd be teaching rather than programming.
In fact I believe THIS is what most "programmers" will be doing in 100 years. The challenge
will be defining the problem domain, the inputs, the desired outputs; the
algorithm and the architecture won't change, or won't change much, and the
vast majority of people won't fiddle with it.
But if HAL doesn't appear and we aren't all retrained as Dr. Chandra,
I believe we'll still be handling a lot of text on flat screens.
I don't think we'll be using sound, and I don't think we'll be using pictures.
(see below)
So predicting what languages will be like in 100 years is predicated
on knowing what computers and peripherals will be like. I think progress
will be slow, for the most part -- that is, I don't think it will be all
that much different from how it is now.
HOW WILL OUR RANGE OF EXPRESSION CHANGE?
If we relied primarily on voice input, languages would be a lot more
like spoken natural languages; there would be far less ambiguity than
most natural languages (so they'd be more like Russian than like English,
for example) but there wouldn't be nearly as much punctuation as there
is in Java and C++.
If we rely primarily on thought-transfer, they'll be something else
entirely. But I don't think this will come in 100 years.
How is a 24x80 IDE window different from punched cards and printers?
Much more efficient but remarkably similar, really. It would not surprise
me if we still use a lot of TEXT in the future. Speech is slow --
a program body stored as audio would be hard to scan through quickly.
Eyes are faster than ears so the program body will always be stored as
either text or pictures.
Pictures - well, pictorial languages assume too much of the work has
already been done underneath. "Programming isn't hard because of all
the typing; programming is hard because of all the thinking." (Who
wrote that in Byte a couple of decades ago?). I don't think we'll be
using pictures. When we get to the point that we can use hand-waving
to describe to the computer what we want it to do, again we'll be
teaching, not programming.
HOW WILL THE ARCHITECTURE CHANGE?
If the target architecture isn't Von Neumann, but something else,
then we may not be describing "algorithms" as we know them today.
Not being up to speed about quantum computing, I can speak to that
example...but there are lots of other variations. Analog computers?
Decimal instead of Binary digital machines? Hardware-implemented
neural networks? Again, I don't see much progress away from binary
digital stored-program machine in 40 years, and I think (barring
a magical breakthrough) this may continue to be the cheapest, most
available hardware for the next 50-100 years.
SO WHAT DO I THINK?
I think IDE's and runtime libraries will evolve tremendously, but
I don't think basic language design will change much. As long as
we continue to use physical devices at all, I think the low-level
programming languages will be very similar to present day ones:
Based on lines of text with regular grammars and punctuation,
describing algorithms. I predict COBOL will be gone, FORTRAN will
still be a dinosaur, and Java and C/C++ will also be dinosaurs.
But compilers for all 4 wi
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
"I'm payin' taxes, but what am I buyin'?" -- James Brown
We do already have some primitive forms of this conversation idea via versioning systems like CVS. The problem is writing a program that recognizes patterns in the changes and learns to do that stuff on its own.
Also, think about languages like Ruby or Lisp where the interpreter can alter a program while it's running. As an example I wrote a small text editor in Ruby/Tk in which you could modify the source code to the editor in a buffer, then choose "eval buffer in application", and that code would run in the context of the application. Once you have the core of such a program, with proper error handling, you need never turn the program off again (as long as you don't redefine the core engine with a bug). I was able to add menus, menu items, rewrite existing routines, etc, all while executing the original code. Of course, emacs has been doing this same thing for years...
Using both CVS and live eval you get much closer to code being a conversation between the programmer and the system.
I do not have a signature
In the great CONS chain of life, you can either be the CAR or be in the CDR.