I think (hope?) that the next wave in hacking will be understanding programming paradigms better as hackers - the specifics of language choice will probably matter a little less. I like the idea of languages that support multiple paradigms internally (e.g., you can embed logic programming into your functional programming language). A while back I spent some time reading Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Pr…
Ask HN: The future of programming languages?
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Re: Ask HN: The future of programming languages?
#22Re: Ask HN: The future of programming languages?
#23Re: Ask HN: The future of programming languages?
#24http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/11/10/the-future-of-programm...
Re: Ask HN: The future of programming languages?
#25Topics that I think will be important: - Functional Programming - Logic Programming - Managing asynchronicity - Managing concurrency / Managing state - Pruning bad directions in OO (see the first two) - Type Systems - Virtual Machines Languages/technologies that I would look at more closely given these are Haskell, Scheme, Prolog, Clojure, Qi, LLVM. I love JS but as far languages go, I would not look there for new id…
So the turn to the web will set back the state of the art in programming by a decade, as the turn to microcomputers did.
Re: Ask HN: The future of programming languages?
#26The future will be more about declarative programming - write down a mental model of the program, and the language/compiler will do the rest. A simple restricted example is SQL - you write what data you want and the optimizer figures out the best "program" for the query, using even genetic optimization in the case of PostgreSQL. Another example is data binding - you write down what data connects to what part of the GUI, and the framework figures out what to update and when. The problem with SQL, data binding etc. is that they are not tightly integrated into a general purpose language, and do not have clear theoretical underpinnings.
A good language will have simple, compact theories and abstractions as general as possible to reduce the mental baggage necessary for programming - instead of remembering hunders of special cases, you should only work with a couple of general constructs.
Optimizers for these languages will have to be far more advanced - remember state between compilations to reduce the impact of whole program optimization, have advanced specialization and type checking capabilities using abstract interpretation etc.
Data models will have to grow too - they will have to be high-level and low-level at the same time to cope with the onslaught of data. The semantic web provides a fairly universal data model with RDF/OWL, but this again could be simplified and abstracted. A data model should also have the capability to specify the physical layout of the data down to the bits, but also at the higher level, such as distribution between disks and machines. Ah, finishing now to avoid tl;dr.
Re: Ask HN: The future of programming languages?
#27I think (hope?) that the next wave in hacking will be understanding programming paradigms better as hackers - the specifics of language choice will probably matter a little less. I like the idea of languages that support multiple paradigms internally (e.g., you can embed logic programming into your functional programming language). A while back I spent some time reading Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Pr…
I'm surprised you included Rails in that list. While there are quite a few Rails jobs, it pales in comparison to what's available for .NET and J2EE. Even PHP blows it away by pure number of jobs.
Re: Ask HN: The future of programming languages?
#28Mandatory: http://paulgraham.com/hundred.html And the... result: http://arclanguage.com/
Arc was criticized when it came out for being basically a few macros on top of Scheme. I don't think that's a valid criticism. I don't know if Arc is the hundred-year language, but whenever the hundred-year language does come out, it might easily be some carefully-chosen macros on top of Scheme, macros that help write other useful macros.
Re: Ask HN: The future of programming languages?
#29I think (hope?) that the next wave in hacking will be understanding programming paradigms better as hackers - the specifics of language choice will probably matter a little less. I like the idea of languages that support multiple paradigms internally (e.g., you can embed logic programming into your functional programming language). A while back I spent some time reading Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Pr…
I'm surprised you included Rails in that list. While there are quite a few Rails jobs, it pales in comparison to what's available for .NET and J2EE. Even PHP blows it away by pure number of jobs.
A quick look around found that Java, C++, C#, javascript, and perl (?) are big in job listing at Dice.com right now. http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/programming-language-jo...
And the always friendly tiobe index at http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... is useful when thinking about current programming language trends.
Re: Ask HN: The future of programming languages?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Game developers don't only use it for speed. Mainly for portability. With c/c++ they can make (portions of their) code run on xbox/ps3/nintendo wii/ds/iphone/whatever.
Very true. Syntax doesn't really matter in terms of performance - what matters is compiler optimizations. Theoretically someone, if they had a mind, could optimize a Python compiler to run just as fast as C (or at least as fast as a non-statically typed language can run). With that in mind, perhaps some sort of modification to the JVM (or a competing VM that isn't controlled by Oracle) that provides an aggressively r…
Yes and no. Slight semantic differences can close off optimizations. There was a great discussion on LtU that pulled in a lot of JIT developers. Mike Pall (LuaJIT) tossed out some optimizations the Tracemonkey developers could exploit, but Brendan Eich pointed out that js can't use them: