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

Easy.

[hey!]

With a gesture-based interface connected to my fishing rod.

I plan on ossifying

[halivar]

Learning new languages every six months in a young man's game. As I get older, I will gravitate towards jobs where I can leverage 15+ years experience in a language to get better-paying positions.

Re:I plan on ossifying

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy enough to move from language to language, but toolstack to toolstack less so. If you've used c++ you can "learn java" very quickly, but learning the increasingly complex libraries and frameworks that tend to accompany it can take awhile. Even if you've worked with similar tools, it can take awhile to learn all the best practices and shortcuts and little nuances.

It even extends beyond programming itself. Methodologies change and the toolstack used to implement those methodologies changes with them. We've generally migrated from bug trackers (bugzilla, mantis, etc) to project trackers (trac, redmine), and chances are in a few years we'll be doing something else.

People joke about old men stuck in their way, but as I get older I kinda get it. After a few iterations my enthusiasm to learn the next greatest thing has waned, and it feels like something I have to do rather than something I want to do, and the gain starts to feel less worth it. Is gradle really that much better than maven? Was maven really that much better than ant+ivy? Once I become a gradle guru, something is just gonna come up and replace it as the defacto, so why even bother?

The only solution is to become a manager and become the roadblock we all hated when we first started.

programming by telling programmers what to program

[bigpat]

In ten years I intend to be programming in management speak, functional specifications and almost completely useless and barely intelligible pseudo code.

Judging by past performance?

[LynnwoodRooster]

Poorly.

Re:10 Years [damned UI's]

[Tablizer]

You are behind, dude, Cherry MX Periwinkle Switches Reloaded++ is now out.

Seriously, who the hell knows what's 10 years down the road. The industry is driven as much by fads as logic, if not more.

I just hope the UI side simplifies so that one doesn't have to say diddle with the minutia of scroll-bar coordinates for everyday GUI idioms and bread-and-butter CRUD. I'd like to focus on domain logic rather than micromanage UI glitches all day.

UI's are f8cking mess unless you target a specific browser brand and version. We devolved from the desktop days. I pray the industry cleans up the UI mess created by the browser. Unfortunately the industry seems to be chasing eye candy fads instead instead of practical things, but I guess the money is in hype and flash.

In summary, get off my UI lawn!

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.

Re:The old-fashioned way!

[MightyYar]

I directly load programs into memory though the tape-in port by modulating my flatulence into a microphone.