Ask Slashdot: How Will You Be Programming In a Decade? (cheney.net)

An anonymous reader writes: Programmer Dave Cheney raised an interesting question today: How will you be programming in a decade? If you look back to a decade ago, you can see some huge shifts in the software industry. This includes the rise of smartphones, ubiquitous cloud infrastructure, and containers. We've also seen an explosion of special-purpose libraries and environments, many with an emphasis on networking and scaling. At the same time, we still have a ton of people writing Java and C and Python. Some programmers have jumped headfirst into new tools like Light Table, while others are still quite happy with Emacs. So, programmers of Slashdot, I ask you: How do you think your work (or play) will change in the next ten years?

Comments

Visual Haskell

[TuringTest]

There's a wealth of new research going on in Programming Language Theory, with several breakthroughs in the last years bridging the gap between functional and imperative programming.

The other trend in declarative programming is reactive languages like React.js and Flux being applied to user interfaces. This allows for tools like React Native which can abstract away all the spaghetti code to handle events, providing a higher abstraction, including the "debug & rewind" and "live programming" capabilities seen in online "web embedded" environments like Github Gist or JSFiddle.

I expect that, as these techniques mature, they will settle down and allow for development techniques that allow for easy discoverability of APIs without having to learn a particular complex syntax, and better programming by connecting components without the drawbacks and limitations of classic Visual tools.

All these new techniques based in Category Theory are driving advances in mainstream languages - starting with libraries like Linq and jQuery but also Python, Javascript and even C++ adopting lambdas, advanced type systems with auto-inference of types, and libraries with constructs for declarative race-free parallelism such as promises and agent models.

The majority of those techniques are being tested first in experimental languages by researchers eating their own dog food, with Haskell often having its most pure form (see what I did there?). Anyone interested in enhancing the expressivity of PLs may lurk Lambda the ultimage, where guys much more clever than you and me hang around and can give pointers to all the relevant theoretical results.