What will programming look like in 2020? (2012)

Link seems busted for me...

2012

The “ Some safe and some bold predictions” comment is almost exactly my view on how programming should evolve. (functional, reactive, going toward dependent types etc ) Interesting how in 2012 it was already so clear!

I think mostly we do have gone in that direction, even if probably even slower than the (already cautious) commenter predicted.

Honest question: why are we as a community so slow at evolving a good, solid programming environment?

I get that each time a new language is introduced, porting over all the existing code + training the people is an immense task. But this is _exactly the problem_, right?

Why aren’t we able to stop for a while and sort out once and for all a solid framework for coding?

It’s not a theoretical ideal: I’m very convinced that the dumb piling up of technologies/languages/frameworks that we use now is significantly slowing down the _actual daily work_ we do of producing software. Definitely >>50% of my time as a programmer is spent on accidental complexity, that i know for sure.

It’s very practical: at this point this whole thing simply feels like very bad engineering, tbh?

For a mere 8 year timeframe, the predictions seem rather poor. It feels like there was such a push among people to have the forward thinking ideas that they overestimated how much would change.

Looking back, the biggest changes between now and 2012 are:

* Git (and github) took over the world in the version control. Git was already the leader in 2012, but mercurial was doing ok and svn was still around to a much greater extent.

* Docker/Kubernetes and the container ecosystem. There was a guess here about app servers, but the poster seemed to thinking of PaaS platforms and Java app servers like Jetty more so. I guess you could say "serverless" is sort of in that vein, but it's far from the majority of use cases as the poster predicted.

* Functional programming ideas became mainstream, except in Go, which is a sort of reactionary back to basics language.

Overall though:

Good predictions:

* The IDE/editor space gets a shake up, though maybe not in the way any of the specific predictions guessed (the rise of VS code)

* Machine learning gets bigger

* Apple introduces a new language to replace Objective-C

* Some sort of middle ground to the dynamic/static divide (static languages have got local type inference, dynamic languages have got optional typing)

Bad predictions:

* No-code tools are still no further along mainstream adoption than 2012

* Various predictions that Lisp/ML/Haskell get more mainstream rather than just having their most accessible ideas cherry picked.

* A new development in version control displaces git

* DSLs, DSLs everywhere. DSLs for app development, DSLs for standard cross database NoSQL access,

> Functional programming ideas became mainstream, except in Go, which is a sort of reactionary back to basics language.

I feel like there is also a return to basic imperative programming, with OO and functional where it makes sense.