The Hundred-Year Language

First, I had already thought about how will programming languages be in the future when I first joined the Compilers Design. Why? Because I realized that the skills we learn by studying how to build compilers is used to make compilers for new programming languages and in the history of technology there had been a lot of improvements on some languages, others may have disappeared, and others have evolved. That last argument is mentioned in the evolutionary trees of languages that diverge by creating new ways to do some things and converge by reusing some attributes from other languages. It’s interesting how some programmers somehow did think “hey, why don’t we evolve the way X language works in order to do this more efficient of easier for us to program” and they just went and did it.

  In almost all lectures I’ve had this semester in the Compilers Design and Parallel Programming I’ve read a lot of arguments about the power increase of the new processors that will allow us to change the way we create programs and applications today. In fact, I didn’t think about the unnecessary efficiency improvement in programs because in the future it won’t even be necessary. I mean, why caring about making more efficient programming code if in the future we will have more power than we need, it would be a waste of time to put an eye on that issues. Now I’m thinking if parallel programming will be necessary in the future, because if we have such a power in processors with high speed, why will it be necessary to make it parallel if it already runs fast? But my counterargument would be: “Yes, there will be an excess of power, but also high demand problems that maybe will overcome that power and parallel programming will be NEEDED”.

  Finally, about programming languages in the future. I disagree with the author, because I’ve seen that people is becoming more innovative and that translates into programmers that are always thinking on new methods to improve programming practices. So, I think many of the programmers that are developing today are thinking on developing a new language that might be useful for the world. So my expectation is to have much more programming languages in the future than we have today, and we will use them for more specific purposes.